Project Dr. Michiel Meeusen
Literature of Hypochondria in the High Roman Empire: Curing the Mind, Knowing the Body
My current project, generously funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, explores literary expressions of health anxiety in the High Roman Imperial era, a period often contemptuously called an 'Age of Hypochondria'. My aim is to contextualise this phenomenon and to situate it within the thought-provoking interaction between medical culture and learned society more generally in this time, which is the main topic of the second monograph that I plan to publish some day.