This book contains eleven papers on the theme of the relationship between astrology and medicine in the ancient and early modern world, most of which were given at a Warburg Institute conference in 2005. For those unfamiliar with this field, it is important to know that ancient astrologies were significantly different from their modern counterpart, as were the ancient scientific frameworks they were situated in. This means that ancient astrologies could have a different and much more interesting relationship to medicine from that which we see today. So while I happily dismiss modern western astrology as utterly irrelevant to modern western medicine, there is a considerable fascination in seeing how different relations between astrology and medicine were mediated in the past. That we see astrology as, for example, magical or irrational or unsupported by evidence does not mean that it has always been seen in this way. That there was a substantial body of thought concerning how the heavens related to health and to disease is something which is amply demonstrated by this book. In particular, there were thought to be significant astrological links to how a disease might progress in a specific case and what the best times to administer treatment might be, as several of the papers address. If we want a full understanding of medical theory and practice in the ancient and early modern world, we can no more dismiss astrology from the history of medicine than we can from the history of astronomy.
I have been careful so far to refer to astrologies in the plural, for there were many of them. One of the great strengths of this book is that some of the papers examine the relationship between astrology and medicine in the Babylonian, Arabic, Chinese, Indian and Tibetan cultures as well as dealing with the more familiar Greco-Roman tradition and its manifestations in the medieval and Renaissance west. Here it is interesting to see how ubiquitous astrology was, and how it took variant forms in different cultures. The same can be said for some conceptions of the human body and its health, either in terms of some form of the humoral theory or as a microcosm in some way related to the heavenly macrocosm. It is also interesting to see how theology plays a role here, particularly in respect to how strongly deterministic astrology was taken to be, notably less so in Christian contexts where free choice between good and evil was thought important.
The papers in this volume are very good at explaining not only the nature of astrological belief in various cultures and its relation to medicine; they are also good at placing those beliefs into the social contexts of those societies. Arguments against astrology are considered as they arose in those cultures, which allows a far more interesting insight into the nature of belief in astro-medicine than a blanket dismissal of such ideas from a modern standpoint. This book also demonstrates an excellent example of co-operation between scholars of different ancient cultures fostered by the Warburg Institute.
This book has been very well produced, and is well illustrated with useful and clearly reproduced figure and tables. If you are just starting out on investigating ancient astrology and its relation to ancient medicine, this is probably not the best place to begin—I would suggest Tamsyn Barton's Ancient astrology and the first few chapters of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos for an introduction—but this is an excellent book for anyone wishing to further their knowledge about the relation of ancient astrology and medicine and in particular to broaden it to cultures outside the Greco-Roman tradition.