Roman medical care before conversion

What was the effect of Christianity on Western medicine? I’m approaching this question via Rodney Stark’s 1996 book, The Rise of Christianity. It looks at the “Jesus Movement” among Hellenistic Jews in the first three centuries, examining sociological evidence to understand how and why this small cult spread. (Here, “cult” has no negative sense, it’s just a sociology term for a set of beliefs attached to some deity.)

Look first at the state of medical care before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its state religion.

Some major epidemics struck during the first few centuries, and we have good Roman documentation for the details. The first began when Roman troops caught an infectious disease while fighting in Iraq in 165. The epidemic swept into Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Rome, causing a very high death rate. It’s now known as the Plague of Galen, because this famous Roman doctor survived it and wrote about it. The epidemic did not die out for 15 years, and Rome had to pause its wars against invading Germanic tribes (who also caught the epidemic).

A second epidemic came 100 years later, in 251. At its height, 5000 people a day were dying in Rome, and half or more of Alexandria’s population perished. Small villages were entirely wiped out. By this time, Egyptians had mostly converted to Christianity, but they were persecuted. The year 250 had seen an intensifying wave of persecution in which Egyptian Christians who refused to sacrifice to any of the various pagan options were tortured and executed.

We don’t know how the invading Germanic tribes handled the epidemics, but we have records of Rome’s response. Stark’s book presents evidence that Christians in the Roman Empire had much higher survival rates. Stark suggests that these high survival rates caused Christianity’s sudden rise to the tipping point of becoming culturally dominant in the following century.

If Rome’s medical customs were then what they became (and are now), this would not have happened. But the pagan culture we know through its myths was not set up to handle medical care during an epidemic. They had medical knowledge (more on that in soon-to-come essays), but they had no tradition of good care.

The Roman and Greek gods commanded rituals, like pouring some wine on the ground or sacrificing a bull, and in exchange for this honor they might do favors for men. Piety to the gods included keeping an oath sworn by one of them, or telling the truth when under oath by one of them. However, the gods did not require people to love each other or act in moral ways. So while you could seek healing by sacrifice to the proper god, no god required you to give medical help.

It appears that Galen, the doctor whose work was taught for many centuries, survived the 165 epidemic by going quickly into the countryside and avoiding contact with sick people. During both plagues, contemporary writings state that many families abandoned their sick at the first symptoms. Thucydides says the same of the earlier Plague of Athens. People who went to the temple of a god to seek healing often died there; in a religious climate where burying the dead was a primary duty, people who had not yet fallen sick were afraid to remove these bodies. Faith in the gods dramatically fell off.

So while Greece and Rome had medical theories and prescriptions, which deeply influenced medieval Europe, they had no firm tradition of medical *care*.

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