We learn of the tri-partite division of medicine first and most elaborately from Celsus; he labeled each branch according to the Greek name, thereby underscoring that these formal divisions had been carried out previously by Greek-speakers. Cures were accomplished through dietetics {diaitetike), through drugs (pharmakeutike), and through surgery (chirourgia), and the doctors who practiced at Rome from the mid-second century bce onwards contributed significantly to each of the three branches. Dietetics became increasingly more elaborate, as special daily regimens to preserve health or, in the sick, to restore it, were described not only for adult men, as in the Hippocratic Corpus, but also for children, young girls approaching puberty, adult women, and old men {Flemming 2000: 220-8). The eastern conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon and the successor kingdoms, especially that of the Ptolemaic monarchs in Egypt, had brought many new spices and minerals to the attention of physicians and pharmacologists of the Hellenistic world. With Rome’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean exotic medicaments became available in ever more plentiful quantities in the city’s markets via the caravan routes from the east {Houston 2004). The Christian moralist and writer Clement of Alexandria heaped scorn about 200 ce on the women of Egypt who smeared their faces and bodies with substances taken from the intestines of the crocodile in order to make their complexions luminous and wrinkle-free {Paidagogos 3.2.5). But it was not only in Egypt, native home of the crocodile, where the cosmetic was readily available, for Galen reported that wealthy women of Rome were likewise wont to use it for the same purpose {A. E. Hanson 1998b: 91). While the therapeutic recipes of the Hippocratic Corpus seldom specified amounts to be employed in a medicament compounded from numerous ingredients, and almost never named a recipe for the practitioner who invented or popularized it, Celsus’ recipes gave exact amounts for ingredients and often named the medical person closely associated with it; his Greek and Latin successors did likewise. Perhaps the greatest advances at Rome were those made in surgery, despite the fact that it remained the choice of last resort behind diet and regimen on the one hand, and the prescription of pharmaka on the other, unless accidents or other emergency situations compelled a practitioner either to perform the needed surgical procedure himself, or to call in another specially skilled in such matters.
World History
