New Medical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus. (360G-Wellcome-082230_Z_07_Z)

Thanks to a grant by the Wellcome Trust, a preliminary survey of 180 unpublished papyri provisionally identified as medical in content in the Oxyrhynchus Collection has been completed. Based on evaluations of the extent, interest and difficulty of these papyrus texts, this project will produce scholarly editions of about fifty of the medical papyri that have been examined, all dating from the first to the sixth centuries AD. These are collected and briefly described in Appendix 1. Of these, t hirteen fragments have been identified as containing works of known authors, namely the Hippocratics, Dioscorides and Galen. The remaining papyri preserve a wide range of medical texts that have been lost in the medieval manuscript tradition. These texts, which were read and used by a wealthy Hellenized community in Roman Egypt, will contribute in a variety of ways to our knowledge of the theory and practice of medicine in antiquity. In bringing to light this hitherto unknown material, the pr oject will dramatically supplement the 270 medical papyri from Egypt published in the last hundred years, of which only about two dozen derive from Oxyrhynchus.