Medical practitioners had long been aware they were unable to cure all the sick persons who sought their help. Medicine’s fallibilities were equally known to the Roman public and elicited from them, in turn, a variety of responses beyond the anger and frustration of a Cato or a Pliny. The Neronian courtier and Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger spoke most warmly about his doctor, claiming that because he devoted his attentions to him alone and deserted his other patients to attend him, his doctor was his friend, not merely some salaried professional (Ben. 6.16). Seneca’s insistence on exclusivity tempers the warmth and gratitude he was expressing, such that his stance seems more that of a patron towards a reliable dependent and a social inferior. The Roman satirist Martial (c.40-104 ce) saw the doctor as someone to poke fun at, playing upon Roman suspicions that the Greek doctor, admitted into the center of the Roman household, had designs on corrupting a young wife:
Leda told her aged husband that she was suffering from a womby disease and lamented that only intercourse would cure her.
But she wept and groaned that her own health did not matter and preferred to die than submit to disgrace.
Her husband begged her to live and preserve her life and youthful beauty, giving permission for others to do what he could not.
The female practitioners departed, and the doctors ran over to her: up went her legs - this is serious medicine. (11.71)
A common response to the professional medicine of the day was to pursue multiple paths for restoration of health, either simultaneously or serially, rather than to place exclusive reliance on doctors and doctoring. The alternatives available to Roman patients were many and manifold, and the shrines of Asclepius at Pergamum and Cos clearly flourished, for both were extensively rebuilt during the earlier Roman Empire. Stories such as that of the woman in the Gospels suffering from a chronic flow of blood for 12 years who reached out to touch Jesus’ robe as he passed testified to the appeal of healing by faith. In one moment she felt herself cured. Her illness and cure were told three times (Mt 9: 20-2; Mk 5: 25-9; Lk 8: 43-8), but the narrative in Mark’s versions began with the observation that she had spent her money on doctors to no avail, and some copies of Luke opened in the same fashion. Helios-Sarapis, the Bringer of Victory, an oracular deity resident at the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, was asked in the second century ce whether or not he advised the petitioner to make use of Hermeinos, doctor at Hermopolis, to cure his eyes (P. Oxy. 42.3078). We do not know whether Helios-Sarapis responded, ‘‘Yes, your should consult Hermeinos,’’ or ‘‘No, you should not,’’ but we can guess with some confidence that, if consulted, Hermeinos was likely to prescribe soothing eye salves (collyria) for the petitioner’s ophthalmia. The fact that the petitioner wanted reassurance from the god that he should visit the Hermopolite doctor in the first place underscores yet once again the fact that neither the medical practitioner nor his craft held the trust and authority in the Roman world that is today awarded physicians, with their vast array of tools for diagnosis and their ever-expanding repertory of cures. Medicine’s impressive successes in the early twenty-first century have not only expanded average life expectancy at birth to near or into the low eighties for those in the affluent west, but have also pushed many alternative medicines to the fringes. The Hippocratic ‘‘Epidemics’’ enjoined the physician to help his patients, or at least not to harm them (Hippoc. Epid. 1.11), and the doctors of the Roman world endeavored to follow this injunction from the ‘‘Father of Medicine’’ with the limited tools at their disposal. There can be no doubt but that medicine offers an interesting lens through which to examine a society and its social preferences.
World History
