The publication in 1724 of Richard Mead's Harveian oration of the previous year provoked a vigorous and instructive controversy. Relying largely upon the evidence of a series of coins struck at Smyrna in Asia Minor, Mead argued that doctors in ancient Rome and its empire were men of education and high social standing, worthy precursors of the London College of Physicians. Ancient allegations of incompetence and corruption he referred to the servile practitioners of surgery, not to the physicians. Retribution was not long in coming. Conyers Middleton, theologian, librarian and unstinting controversialist, retorted that, whatever the situation in Greek Smyrna, the doctor in Rome and Italy was often a slave or an ex-slave, who fully deserved all the criticism heaped upon him and his fellows. In the pamphlet war that followed, Middleton more than held his ground, and there have been few since to question his basic division between the Greeks and the Romans over their attitudes towards medicine and physicians, or his assertion of the generally low social status of all medical men in Rome. In the subsequent two and a half centuries scholars have added little to his conclusions and few have commanded his wide range of learning. In their attempts to answer the seductive question of what the Romans thought of their physicians, prejudice has often been canonised as fact, and a traditional commonplace dignified with the title of insight.