Humanities in the Village: Drugs, Amulets, and Birth Charts: Women's Health in Ancient Egypt

Description

Lingxin Zhang, who recently defended her Ph.D. of Egyptology in the Johns Hopkins Department of Near Eastern Studies, will give a talk entitled "Drugs, Amulets, and Birth Charts: Women's Health in Ancient Egypt" as part of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute's Humanities in the Village series.

This talk derives from Zhang's research on women's health in ancient Egypt. First, it offers an overview of ancient Egypt's medical, magical, and divinatory corpora and how these practices were employed en masse to care for women. The talk then discusses the limitation of relying solely on the aforementioned materials to reconstruct women's care in ancient societies, as these artifacts primarily reflect the practices of male physicians from ancient Egypt. Finally, the talk concludes by commending future research to incorporate ethnographic studies of midwifery.