Caroline Musgrove is the Events, Outreach and Partnerships Coordinator at the Cambridge School Classics Project in the U.K. She completed her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge in 2017. An historian by training, Caroline’s interests range from ancient medicine, gender and early Christianity, to approaching difficult issues like slavery and decolonization in the Classics classroom. Caroline is passionate about improving access to Classics, having not had the opportunity to encounter the subject herself before college.
We spoke to Caroline about her research as a medical historian and the importance of the patient voice, how Latin teachers can address the representation of disability in their classrooms, and the role of language when it comes to discussing disability and illness.
1. What made you want to pursue Classics?
I have always been fascinated by stories, especially ones we tell about the past. This fascination led me to question why we have traditionally focused on some voices at the expense of others. I am a medical historian by training, and my PhD work was partly about uncovering the lost voices of ancient female patients. I guess what went unwritten in my research, but what I understand now, is that there is something universally human about the medical encounter in any era. It’s a place where people come together to negotiate the meaning of illness, suffering and mortality; questions which are timeless.
2. Why did you think it was so important to take the time to get at the patient voice?
I realized as I did my research that the patient’s voice was often strangely absent from medical writing. Much of what we know about ancient medicine was written by physicians, and even in well-known texts like the Hippocratic case histories, it is difficult to locate the human being behind the prognosis. When you think about it, this is not so very different to the medicine of our own day. In the modern medical encounter, the patient’s voice is sometimes a burden, something to be overcome so the doctor can decipher the “objective fact” of the disease within. This is a problematic standpoint for any society.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in relation to the Cambridge Latin Course. The storytelling approach offers so many possibilities for putting the patient at the center; just think of Barbillus in Stage 20. Yet so often this story is framed as a struggle between the Greek doctor Petro and the Syrian astrologer, a problematic narrative that pits “western rationalism” against “eastern superstition”. This approach becomes an unnuanced “progress” narrative, where medicine represents a march of supposedly unbroken innovation from the Greeks to ourselves. But if our model of medical progress is solely about technical skill and retrospective fact, how do we make room for the human in this most human of sciences? And what priorities are we instilling about modern medicine?
3. Do you have any thoughts about how teachers could address the representation of disability in the Latin classroom?
Teaching materials are primarily populated by young, healthy, able-bodied characters. This pattern even extends to the gladiators and soldiers we encounter, who we know have seen combat. This could form the basis for some interesting classroom discussion; students will likely identify very quickly how unrealistic this representation is from an historical point of view. Students could be introduced to archaeological finds such as the prosthetic leg made of bronze found near Capua, dating to around the 3rd Century BCE.
The Roman baths present another opportunity to raise the subject of disability, a discussion that could be particularly productive alongside a consideration of ancient votive offerings. These mysterious representations of body parts dedicated at shrines across the ancient world could help students think through a range of ailments for which the ancients might have sought healing from the gods. Teachers could ask students to consider offerings of votive eyes, ears and feet – for what ailments might these offerings have been made? How might those making such offerings have felt? And what might sufferers have expected in exchange?
4. Finally, what easy change do you think would make a big difference in how we discuss disability and illness, in the Latin classroom and beyond?
Language. Many scholarly books on disability in antiquity go to great lengths to justify their use of terminology, clearly signalling that they are aware of the need to avoid discriminatory labels. Yet many go on to use pejorative language all the same, often giving the reader the curious sense that the author could not imagine that a person with a disability might also be a reader of their book. The assumption seems to be that there is somehow a separation between academic writing and people with disabilities today. As Annie Sharples said recently in a post for Eidolon, “People should be … far more concerned with making their research, and indeed their wider discipline, as accessible as possible. This means not only enabling disabled voices to effectively engage with them, but also being mindful of their own biases towards disability and the language they use to describe it”.
Connect with Caroline and the work of CSCP on Twitter at @Caecilius_CLC. You can learn more about the work of CSCP on this link.
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Nota bene! This piece is part of our Diversity and Inclusion in the Latin Classroom series. To learn more about the series, please visit the home page.
