Transcript

HELEN KING

Hello, I'm Helen King. I'm Professor of Classical Studies at the Open University. And I'm here at the Open University Library in Milton Keynes to talk to one of our former PhD students, Rebecca Fallas, about using online resources. So thanks very much for coming, Rebecca.

REBECCA FALLAS

Hello.

HELEN KING

So, big question-- if you haven't got access to a university library like this, how do you find sources for ancient medicine?

REBECCA FALLAS

Well, it is quite difficult, because all the resources I use pretty much are behind a university library paywall. There is a couple of options. Google Books is a really good place to start. It has an awful lot of the ancient texts in translation on there. But unfortunately, as is the problem with Google Books, because of copyright restrictions, a lot of the time, pages are missing as well. It lets you look at a certain amount of the book.

The other place to look is Perseus Digital Library. Really, it's the site that has all the Greek and Latin core texts on it, most of which are in English as well. And it's free.

HELEN KING

Right. So let's have a look at Perseus. What do you think makes it a good resource?

REBECCA FALLAS

It has a wide selection of texts, everything from the Hippocratic texts to Socrates and Suetonius and Homer. It allows you to look at things in both Greek and Latin, and the English translations as well.

HELEN KING

OK. So we've got that online here. We've got Perseus Tufts, because it's hosted at Tufts University. If I just open that up-- right. So what's the quickest way of finding something? Suppose we want to find that famous passage of Xenophon describing what health is?

REBECCA FALLAS

Yeah.

HELEN KING

Where do we start?

REBECCA FALLAS

So if you go into the top right-hand corner, there's a white box that you can use to search. So you've got all the list of Xenophon's works that Perseus has online. So if we look for the Memorabilia--

HELEN KING

OK, so this clearly isn't Xenophon, is it? So what's this?

REBECCA FALLAS

This is a commentary explaining all the Greek words. You can see the Greek words here on the left, and then an explanation of what they might mean in that context.

HELEN KING

So that's going to be too technical for the sorts of things we want. So if we go back to where we were before, and then down here, we've got Xenophon in Greek, Xenophon in English. So go on to that one. OK, there's Xenophon. So how do we find the passage about health?

REBECCA FALLAS

OK. So we want to look for Book Four. So if you go on the left-hand side, there's a table of contents. We were looking at 4.2, 31 to 32.

HELEN KING

So I'll click on section 31. OK. And there we have this discussion of health. "Health is good. Sickness is an evil." So how do we find the rest of this?

REBECCA FALLAS

So, you can either go down to the left-hand side in the table of contents again, and select 32.

HELEN KING

So I could go down there.

REBECCA FALLAS

Or at the top of the page, there's two blue arrows. And you can just press on the right-hand one to go--

HELEN KING

So there's this point that health is not always a good thing, because it might mean that-- if you were healthy, you end up fighting. Whereas if you are sick, you end up being left behind, so you survive. So if we wanted to go further than that and think about health and Xenophon, what would we do next?

REBECCA FALLAS

OK. Well we can actually search within the text itself. So on the right-hand side, in the middle, is the search box. And this will let you search within the text you are looking at.

HELEN KING

OK. So if I'm going to put something in there-- if I put "health" and click Search, there's just one passage, so-- oh, great. And it's already-- it's highlighted, so we can see where that bit comes in. So what's he saying here? "Exercise as much as you can do it, because it ensures good health but doesn't hamper the care of the soul." I like that.

But there's also more information we could get on this passage, isn't there?

REBECCA FALLAS

There is. On the right-hand side, we have a section called "References."

HELEN KING

OK, so that's here. Yeah. We can find out about who Socrates was if we go on this biographical link here in the References section, and we get a biography of Socrates. Now what is this biography of Socrates? How do we find out what it is, when it was published, whether we take it seriously or not? If you go on this entry, which takes you back to the beginning, that will tell you some details.

REBECCA FALLAS

OK, yeah. So this one's published in 1873.

HELEN KING

OK. Well, that explains why the language in it is quite wordy, quite archaic. It's not the most up-to-date thing we've ever seen in our lives.

REBECCA FALLAS

That's one of the drawbacks of Perseus. A lot of the texts that they use are ones that are out of copyright, so therefore are older.

HELEN KING

"Athens, so rich in the means of mental culture." I don't think we'd say that today.

REBECCA FALLAS

I don't know. It's a bit of flair.

HELEN KING

So if you go down to the bottom of that-- OK, so that's Smith's Dictionary.

REBECCA FALLAS

From 1873. So even older than our translated text. But it just-- it does give you the information in a form that's easy to access.

HELEN KING

And you can also click on all these blue links to go back into the Greek text or the English translation to find out where the evidence comes from, so that's really useful.

REBECCA FALLAS

So, yeah. So one of the problems with it being the 1873 version is there are certain words that weren't used then that we might use today. So if we actually try searching for "wellbeing" in the text, instead of "health"--

HELEN KING

Put that in the search box. Ah, nothing.

REBECCA FALLAS

Nothing at all. So that's one of the words that we just don't find.

HELEN KING

So we just wouldn't translate it as "wellbeing."

REBECCA FALLAS

Yeah. So it might just be translated as "health." But if you go back into the top right-hand corner, where we searched for Xenophon before, and we get--

HELEN KING

Ah. Now we get some hits. OK, so lots of those are, in fact, things like dictionaries and commentaries, where someone else is using the term. OK.

REBECCA FALLAS

So it's pulling it from the entire Perseus catalogue.

HELEN KING

What about if you can read Greek?

REBECCA FALLAS

We can also look at the Greek text directly. So if we go back to the Memorabilia page, on the right-hand side, we have a section just above where we clicked on References saying the Greek.

HELEN KING

Oh, OK. So Greek, 1921. Oh, OK. So we can compare exactly the same section, the Greek version and the English version there. So if you can read Greek, you can therefore go down and find-- there we are. There, it's there.

REBECCA FALLAS

Comes up with a nice translation of the word for you as well.

HELEN KING

Oh, that's very useful, isn't it? "Good for the health, wholesome, sound, healthy." So we could do quite a lot more with it. Well, that's great. So we've got an easy way in there, and if we want to learn more, we could go further. There's an online tutorial that takes you through some of this. But the basics, we can now have a quick look.

REBECCA FALLAS

Yeah.

HELEN KING

That's great. Thank you very much.