Educational Innovation: Narrative Medicine Course in Kasr Al-Ainy “The House of Life”; Bridging the Past, Navigating the Present and Drawing Vision for the Future.

This paper aims to elucidate the careful connection of medical practice in Ancient Egypt covering the time span with the theoretical and practical constructs of “Narrative medicine” interventions in today’s health care settings; proposing the essence of a training model in Narrative Medicine which is designed to prepare future physicians to practice medicine ethically and compassionately, using reflective manners that helps to clarify personal values and a sense of professional identity.

‘The very sky and sea-line of her soul’: Nature, Destruction, and Desire in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems

When critics write of ‘truth to nature’ in Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, they rarely refer specifically to Rossetti. While his paintings situate women in medievalised environments saturated with floral imagery, nature itself seems relegated to an aesthetic function. This trope seems to be continued in his ballads in Poems, where the natural world is allied to the female figure and can be read as directly relating to the beauty of the woman. This essay will argue for a more complex and nuanced relationship between the poet and his poetic figures. Rossetti wrote of his concern that his poems should be free of ‘painter's tendencies’ (Fredeman IV: 413), and though the parallels between his paintings and his poems have been explored thoroughly, I shall argue that there is a disjunction when it comes to the depiction of the natural world, which serves a different, less aesthetic, and more intricate function in many of the poems. This approach is best traced in ‘The House of Life’ sonnets, where the relationship between the speaker's emotions, depicted through a series of environmental metaphors, and the concepts with which he struggles is one which can be unpicked by exploring his changing approach to nature.

Libraries from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.800 BCE–250 CE

This chapter is a survey of collections of literary texts from Late Period and Graeco-Roman Egypt, c.750 BCE–250 CE, effectively the last millennium of the ancient Egyptian culture. Examples of different forms of collections are described and discussed in detail: temple libraries and private libraries, as well as groups of literary texts found in tombs, in rubbish dumps, in waste paper collections, and re-used in cartonnage. The texts include narratives, wisdom instructions, science (esp. divination and medicine), and cultic texts (esp. ritual guidelines, religious treatises, and hymns). Additional paragraphs concern the use of master copies, different types of storage, the abduction of libraries, and the so-called House of Life.