While there are some studies on medical tools in antiquity, none of them deals with medical machines. These are mainly depicted in two treatises of the Hippocratic corpus that deal with bone reduction. The texts, On Fractures and On Articulations, which are two of the oldest works in the Hippocratic corpus, are premised on the idea that the body’s treatment is better achieved with rational, practical means that build a relationship of trust between the physician and the patient. Accordingly, the function and use of the Hippocratic machines by physicians is critically approached with a view to investigating the way medical machines interact with this leading doctrine of Hippocratic medicine. By differentiating between Hippocratic bone machines and simple medical tools used in bone reductions, the chapter concludes that bone-reduction machines, in contrast to simple medical tools, are mainly identified through the great amount of power they can release, which could be both beneficial and harmful for the patient, depending, in most of the cases, on the way the physician uses the machine. Moreover, the use of machines, by enhancing the physician’s craft, jostles it; mechanical bone reduction depends less on the physical power of the physician’s body (hands etc.), his knowledge and skill and more on the power of the machine.

This chapter proposes that the myths of Hephaistos, the ancient Greek god of metalwork and the only physically impaired member of the Olympic pantheon, can provide insights into ancient inspirations for and understandings of assistive technology. It explores the range of different types of assistive technology that impaired and disabled individuals used in classical antiquity to facilitate their physical mobility, covering staffs, sticks, crutches, corrective footwear, extremity prostheses, conveyances, equids, bearers, and caregivers. It notes the frequent association of impairment and technology in classical antiquity. It argues for a reassessment of the suitability of the Medical Model for use in relation to impairment and disability in classical antiquity under certain circumstances.

The aspirations to autonomy, independence, and equality that had so effectively boosted the discourse of modern dominium were never realized. The rationalization and expansion of the economy generated enormous wealth inequalities between the propertied classes and the large class of propertyless wage laborers. The latter experienced oppression rather than autonomy, material dependence rather than the independence, and exclusion instead of equality. The “social question” prompted social reformers of all stripes to interrogate the role of property law (in the emergent industrial world. The new political and intellectual climate ushered in by the “social question” transformed the ideological discourse about property, the concerns of the jurists, and, to an extent, the doctrines of law of property. Alternative conceptualizations of property focused on social relations, redistribution and cooperation, started appearing in the writings of philosophers, economists and pamphleteers. And a new generation of jurists, interested in functionalist and consequence-based approach to property, gained power in law faculties around Europe, Latin America and beyond.

The chapter charts the emersion of a powerful rhetorical attack on fedual property in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, a powerful combination of critiques that would become one of the standard tropes of the modern property discourse well beyond the boundaries of Europe. To this fabricated negative archetype, French jurists juxtaposed the modern idea of Roman absolute dominium enshrined in the Napoleonic Code. Neither Roman nor absolute, the new law of property was a collection of prexisting doctrines couched in the lnaguage of a hyerbolic individualism.

The nineteenth-century theorists of modern Romanist dominium, the great French treatise writers and the German Romanists, embarked in a quest for coherence, aspiring to develop a body of property law that was both normatively and conceptually coherent. These jurists sought to build an architecture of logically interrelated property doctrines informed by the unifying commitment to maximizing the owner’s freedom of action. Yet, this coherence was illusory. Far from being coherent, modern property was riven with tensions that could hardly be disguised. This chapter examines the jurists’ attempts to deal with four doctrines that threatened to strain the coherence of the property system: emphyteusis, possession, the limits on ownership and common ownership. While ultimately unsuccessful, these attempts are nonetheless worth exploring. For one thing, these failed attempts opened rifts in the apparently solid edifice of modern dominium, rifts that, a couple of decades later, the social critics will be quick to exploit. Most importantly, the jurists’ efforts to ease these tensions throw into sharp relief a diversity of ideological and methodological views that hardly surfaces in the nineteenth-century property treatises.

This chapter explores the slow and uneven property reform path ushered in by the short-lived liberal reformers that gathered around Baron von Stein. After Stein’s resignation, the discourse of property modernization was shortlived and the reconcpetualization of property was carried on by two leading,moderately conservative Roman law scholars who had been close to Stein’s cicle: Barthold Georg Niehbur and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Animated by sincere scholarly devotion, and yet not shy to use Roman law and agrarian history to support their political agenda, Neihbur built a powerful narrative equating the liberation of the German peasantry to the struggle of the dispossessed Roman free peasant. Simultaneously, Savigny outlined a new Romanist architecture for the law of property designed to enable and protect the full mastery of the owner’s will over a physical thing.

This chapter explores Galen’s ideas concerning the digestive-nutritive process. It focuses on his explanation of the motion of nutritive matter from its ingestion as food through its alteration into blood until its complete assimilation to the different body parts. The discussion follows its path inside the body from the mouth to the individual parts and describes the changes it undergoes in its different anatomical ‘stations’ and by what means it moves through these ‘stations’. In so doing it brings to light a fundamental but generally overlooked part of the digestive-nutritive process in Galen, namely physical motions of the parts such as the oesophagus, stomach and intestines. The chapter shows how these motions of contraction and extension actively and ‘mechanically’ move the nutritive matter into and through the body by pulling, pushing and compressing the parts of the body and the matter they hold inside them.

This chapter charts the emergence of an anti-feudal disocurse of property modernization and the newly indpendent republics of Latin America. While the tones and the arguments of this anti-feudal discourse echoed the assault on feudal property in the metropole, the intellectual sources and the material interests of the detractors of feudalism in Latin America were far more complex. The liberal creole elites drew upon a vast and diverse political-economy literature that went beyond the obvious canonical authors of the French Enlightenment and included semi-peripheral regional traditions, such as the Neapolitan Enlightenment, that more closely resonated with their specific concerns about underdevelopment and metropolitan-satellite relations. Committed to agricultural improvement but also reluctant to undo the semi-feudal relations of production that allowed the landed elite to extract profit from the peasantry, jurists crafted a system that combined feudal property and modern dominium.