“They barked like dogs”. A Case of Kynanthropy in Amida, 560 AD, and the Dangers of Retrospective Diagnosis, lecture by Nadine Metzger (University Erlangen-Nürnberg), King’s College London, March 14, 2017, 5:30–7:00 pm

Worn down by war, famine and religious persecution the Byzantine border city of Amida fell victim to collective madness: In 560 AD, townspeople exhibited strange symptoms like dog-like barking, crawling on all fours, and loitering around graveyards. Did they mentally react to the severe – and maybe traumatizing – stresses they suffered during the previous hardships? However, neither its contemporaneous Syriac chronicler John of Ephesus nor ancient medicine offered any traumatic explanation of the affliction. Even though ancient physicians could diagnose melancholic ‘kynanthropy’, their conceptual framework did not allow the notion of ‘psychological trauma’. Instead of retrospective diagnosis, the paper seeks to contextualize and interpret the significance of dog-like behaviour for the people of the sixth century.

Nadine Metzger is a medical historian whose research focuses on psychopathological phenomena in Late Antiquity and their reception, i.e. lycanthropy, epilepsy, possession, kynanthropy and psychological trauma. In 2010 she completed her PhD at Newcastle. Her subsequent monograph Wolfsmenschen und nächtliche Heimsuchungen on lycanthropy and incubus was published in 2011. She is currently working on her habilitation at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Ethics, University Erlangen-Nürnberg. This project widens her research interests to early 20th-century medical theory.