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  • 33 - Medicine

  • from PART Vb - ART AND CULTURE
    • By Vivian Nutton, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London
  • Edited by Alan K. Bowman, University of Oxford, Peter Garnsey, University of Cambridge, Dominic Rathbone, King's College London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    12 October 2000, pp 943-965

  • Summary

    Voluminous writings of Galen are the major source of information on Roman medicine. This chapter redresses the traditional imbalance by looking first at the general background and broader medical developments before describing the achievements of four major medical men, Soranus, Aretaeus, Rufus and Galen. Far from displaying a monolithic and dull academicism, medicine in the first two centuries of the Roman empire was the focus of a lively debate and discussion, and the concern of a great variety of healers, not just of the devotees of Hippocrates. The topic of acute and chronic diseases was also treated at length by an author of a different theoretical standpoint, Aretaeus of Cappadocia. To think of medicine in the Roman empire solely in terms of the surviving medical texts, the productions of only a few authors, is to underestimate the possibilities of healing available, and to attribute an exaggerated importance to the mere chance of survival.