More about Heinrich von Staden and His Sather Lectures

The 96th Sather Professor is Heinrich von Staden, Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, who is one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient science and medicine. His monumental book Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (1989) systematically gathers and discusses the fragmentary evidence concerning the scientist who seems to have been the first to dissect the human body. It is a major contribution to the history of Greek intellectual discourse, and won both the Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association and the William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for History of Medicine.

Von Staden is the author of more than one hundred articles and encyclopedia entries on ancient medicine, ancient philosophy, and other topics in ancient Greek culture. His interests and publications extend to the field of comparative literature; he was for many years a professor of both Classics and Comparative Literature at Yale University, after receiving his doctorate at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1998.

Von Staden has appeared on public radio in this country to comment on his research as well as on political and artistic issues in contemporary South Africa, the land of his birth. He was also involved in a Channel 4 television broadcast in the United Kingdom, on the topic of ancient surgery. He has delivered named lectures around the world, and has held visiting professorships at the Università della Calabria, Italy, the University of Texas at Austin, and Caltech. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and a Member of the American Philosophical Society, and has served as president of both the International Federation of Classics Associations and of the Society for Ancient Medicine.