In Conversation with Barbara Zipser

Hello I’m Barbara Zipser and I work in the History department here at Royal Holloway. My background is Latin and Greek, and I teach ancient history, a bit of medieval history, but mostly I teach history of medicine, science, and technology.

Lucy: What kind of courses are you currently overseeing at Holloway?

A: Right now, I’m on partial teaching at the minute, as I have a large research project that covers costs for teaching. So, I’m not teaching as much as a full-time member of staff but I’m currently teaching on Republics, Kings, and People. It’s a first-year course so that’s history of ideas and as my main background is also ancient philosophy it’s quite close to what I do.

Lucy: You say you’re doing a research project at the minute, what sort of thing is that?

A: I’m in the final stretches of a large funded Welcome Trust project on pharmacognosy. Pharmacognosy means recognising or identifying medicinal herbs and plants from pre modern sources. So, if an ancient medical text says to take a collection of specific plants and boil them to extract the ingredients by adding alcohol or something else, then we obviously need to know what it is and how to translate this. So, we’re developing a new methodology on how to identify these ingredients. And quite often the answer is that it’s not possible. And quite often people seem to think they know what it is and this the turns out to be false. So that’s another pitfall when people who aren’t fully trained in ancient medicine start to work on the material. That you somehow suddenly recognise that the translation you have inside your head might be wrong. And obviously also the plants could have changed, in that plants evolve over time as well so quite a lot of medicinal herbs have changed.

Lucy: You mention about people not being necessarily trained in ancient medicine. So how did you personally get involved in ancient medicine and kind of what drew you to ancient medicine?

A: I always wanted to do something interdisciplinary. So, one part of this is that I have paleography training, training in reading ancient manuscripts, which is always something that intrigued me. I did this parallel to my degree and then we also had a professor who taught history of science at my university, so I did a bit of philosophy, literature, and linguistics and then we also had this training in the history of science, and I found it really intriguing. I then started to work on the history of medicine for my PhD, when I was looking for a PhD topic, I had a list of various things, and my PhD supervisor then picked this one as the strongest. And if you want to know how I found the text I was working on, I ordered the wrong book by mistake in the library! So, I ordered it from stock, and I mistyped the shelf mark and so I got the wrong book and that is how I found the topic for my PhD! "I got the wrong book and that us how I found the topic for my PhD!"

Lucy: What a lucky accident! So, what kind of things have you done in the past, you spoke about what you’re currently doing, but what kind of things have you looked at before?

A: I have been mostly externally funded so I apply for funding, and it’s worked out quite well to get research projects. So, I spent quite a lot of time with that, and I mostly work on manuscript translation of Greek medical texts, but I also work on lexicography. The Mediterranean was interconnected there were trade connections and there were political connections and if you wanted to trade a certain medicinal ingredients you needed to know the name. So, I work on these translations and as I also learned a bit of Arabic when I was a PhD student it’s quite helpful for the Middle Ages but mostly it’s Latin and Greek. I get to travel to quite a lot of interesting places which is good. I’ve been to the Vatican, Paris, Rome, Florence, Oxford, and Cambridge so I get to work with old manuscripts. The oldest original manuscript I had in front of me dated from the 10th century CE. It’s hard work I can tell you. You know it sounds great going to Paris for three days but for me this is hard work. Lots of bureaucracy and security checks as you work with invaluable cultural heritage just getting through to the manuscript is difficult. Then recognising and reading the handwriting, comparing it across and looking at the ink. It is quite exhausting. So, I’ve been to all these places, but I haven’t seen the sights!

Lucy: Clearly, you’ve done a lot of research into translating the manuscripts but why do you think that’s important? Some might suggest that it’s not important to look at Hippocrates because we have much better ideas of medicine now. In your words why is ancient medicine important?

A: In antiquity there was a bigger emphasis on prevention of disease which is something that we’ve forgot today. There was big connection with nutrition for instance. And, other factors of lifestyle, diet, profession, and how housing affects health for instance. A doctor would check if the house was too cold, hot, dry, or damp and what kind of effect this has on you. So, there is this microclimate inside the house that would be examined and the climatic conditions outside. They worked with calendars so knew when the wind would change, when the humidity would change and what kind of effect this has on infectious diseases. We know today that this is very true, but we don’t take it into account anymore. We construct towns because there is space and because of trade connections. There are certain fashion requirements about what a house should look like. But we don’t construct or plan towns to promote health and that is the problem today, I think. So, our dwellings should be functional and healthy, and this is something that we can learn from classical antiquity. Today doctors are just trying to catch up, occasionally they have a good initiative, such as five a day, but prevention is not the focus. In antiquity they perceived the world like an organism that can also catch diseases as well and then you get earthquakes for instance. But I think that is very appropriate that we should treat our world better. It’s a different approach. We have a report by an ancient author who said that there were persistent problems with unhealthy conditions and then just they moved the town elsewhere.

Lucy: I hadn’t even thought about it like that. But I guess they always say about how the fumes and things, so I guess it’s a similar kind of thing in a way.

They would have had quite similar furnaces, so they knew quite a lot about risk factors. Risk factors such as catching something from someone if you’re at proximity with them, and ideas about how stagnant air. So, a lot about air flow and controlling the four qualities (hot, cold, wet, or dry) and when you think about it this is what it boils down to. We know today that certain diseases have seasonal peaks, chicken pox in Spring for instance. This is because then the climatic circumstances are such that these specific sizes of droplets can spread better. You can come up with forecasts and you can use it for diagnoses so what is the most likely disease that’s going to happen right now. So, lots of really good ideas there.

Lucy: I guess we can’t really talk about ancient medicine in the post pandemic world without bringing it back to the pandemic. Sort of just trying to link in the ideas that you’ve had about ancient medicine and maybe their attitudes to epidemics.

A: For instance, the Plague of Athens was on my syllabus for a long time that was an emerging disease that spread from sub-Saharan Africa via trade routes to Greece and Athens in particular. So, we looked at risk factors such as population density, stagnant air, population shifts, refugees, and the societal effects of the epidemic. So, what happens if society disintegrates. That is something that I’ve taught for a long time and how we perceive the world and how we live with and in the world. I’m quite grateful that I had the opportunity to teach several student generations, obviously it’s tragic that it happened, but it was bound to happen. These pandemics just occur at some point, nobody knows why but at least my former students went into this with a certain amount of preparation and background knowledge. I taught this pre pandemic, and I taught it as a sort of hypothetical topic, how disease acts and the effects of plague and pandemic and then it all became real. I taught a further subject on history of medicine during the academic year 2019-2020. It was always on my syllabus to include snippets of current affairs that have to do with medicine so whatever comes up in the news we have a brief discussion of it in the seminars. I like to link my teaching to the present and we were discussing the pandemic since mid-January. So mid-January we had discussion on masks and supply chains and all that a few weeks ahead of the government. We saw this coming at us and I invited someone who is well connected to various people in decision making positions. She joined one of our seminars and so we discussed it in real time. A couple of weeks later it was then debated by the WHO, so it was crazy. It was a very intense time but again at least I thought my students were prepared. It is very fulfilling to teach these topics to prepare the students and send them out with a certain number of unusual skills. In the job market you also need something special, if you arrive there as a generic person you might get the job or you might not and then they think that this one has done history of science. If they’re looking at science or healthy living, perhaps someone who has done ancient medicine might be slightly better equipped. It is always good to have a sort of special expertise.

Lucy: Just to wrap up is there anything you would want to mention at the end that you think I haven’t covered or that you wanted to mention?

A: I ran a three-year collaboration funded by the Welcome Trust. There was also someone from Switzerland, Kew Gardens took part, and Israel. In mid-March we made it to Israel for a workshop. That workshop looked quite different from our funding application which had been pre-pandemic so travelling to Israel was complicated anyway but during the pandemic this was even more complicated. We visited some of the research environment of the University of Haifa which was quite exciting. They teach Israel studies which includes everything from history, sciences, economics as an interdisciplinary topic. We travelled to spice farms and pharmaceutical industries that used traditional medicines which was interesting. We attended a cooking workshop run by a Bedouin lady and had lunch in the house of a Druze lady, so she cooked for us, she runs a small business providing food in her own house and that was exceptional. You have all these communities in proximity, and they share certain characteristics but also have their own heritage and identity and they’re connected to a research environment so that was curious. By day I’m an academic but by night I sometimes help in forensic investigations, and I’ve been working on a cold case investigation for a long time. I’ve just appeared in a documentary about this. The documentary was produced by Raw TV which is the company that did for instance ‘Tinder Swindler’ and ‘Three Identical Strangers’ so very high profile. That just came out, we have the initial data for the first 4 days in Germany where it launched, and it was the best performing title of the year on Sky crime and the second-best performing documentary on all of Sky. It will come out here after Christmas and the show is called ‘The Child in the Box - who killed Ursula Herrmann?’. They tend to win quite a lot of awards I think the producer won the Golden Globe for a previous project, so it was good, the best production company in London. A bit of a reward for all the hard work for all those years on the cold case!

Lucy: That’s exciting for you and I will keep my eye out for it! Thank you so much Barbara for agreeing to meet with me and for your time.

Interviewed by Lucy Ham (22-23 Editor), 3rd Year History

Issue 10, Food, Medicine and Health, Spring 2023

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If you would like to keep your eyes peeled for the documentary Barbara discussed, you can find the trailer using this link https://www.raw.co.uk/ the-child-in-the-box-who-killed-ursula-herrmann