Alain Touwaide
Alain Touwaide (born 19 September 1953 in Brussels-Berchem Sainte Agathe) is a US historian of medicine and sciences of Belgian origin currently researching at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C.
His education includes first degrees in classics (1975) as well as oriental philology and history (1977) and a PhD in classics (1981), all earned at the University of Louvain. He received his habilitation à diriger des recherches (capability of directing research) at the University of Toulouse (1997). He won numerous prizes and grants, amongst others of the Earth Watch Institute, and has taught at several universities in Spain, Italy, France and Belgium. Touwaide is proficient in twelve languages.[1] His main research area is medicinal plants of Antiquity, his approach being transdisciplinary, that is, not only philological and historical, but also botanical and medical, ethnological and anthropological, constituting ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology. In 2005, Touwaide received a grant of the National Institutes of Health for a four year research project “Medicinal plants of Antiquity: A Computerized Database”. Ancient Greek therapeutical texts are to be digitized, indexed and analyzed both in the original and in translation.
From 2007-2008 he was president of the Washington Academy of Sciences.
Selected publications
- Peter Dendle & Alain Touwaide & (eds.). Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Medieval Studies Conference at The Pennsylvania State University. Boydell& Brewer, 2008.
- Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds & Alain Touwaide (eds). Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1500 (AVISTA Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, volume 5). Ashgate, 2006.
- Gianni Aliotta, Daniele Piomelli, Antonino Pollio & Alain Touwaide. Le piante medicinali del “Corpus Hippocraticum (Hippocratica Civitas 5). Guerini Associati, 2003.