Today was the last talk in the lecture series for our exhibition at the Charité Museum of Medical History in Berlin.

Chiara wrote an excellent article about the making-of the exhibition on her blog, Mental Life and History, along with pictures of some of the artifacts and Christoph Geiger’s designs:

“The exhibition is devoted to the ideas about body, soul and the interaction between the two elaborated by ancient Greek and Roman doctors and thinkers. The image of the octopus, with its tentacles stretching out from a head-like body was used by the Stoic philosophers to describe precisely the working of mental functions in humans: the seven ‘mental’ faculties emanate from the ‘ruling part of the soul’ (which they called the hegemonikon). These include the senses, as well as biological processes such as reproduction and growth.

“The visitor of the museum is taken to a trip back in time, to explore the beginnings of Western scientific thinking about human embodied life, and invited to place them in dialogue with modern paradigms and discoveries. What are the differences between modern, or/and non-Western understandings of ‘mind’, ‘mental’, ‘soul’ and what Graeco-Roman thinkers chose to discuss?”

The exhibition runs until 11. September 2016.