Vita Romanorum

Medicine

Non rem antiqui damnabant, sed artem, maxime vero quaestum esse manipretio vitae recusabant. ideo templum Aesculapii, etiam cum reciperetur is deus, extra urbem fecisse iterumque in insula traduntur et, cum Graecos Italia pellerent, diu etiam post Catonem, excepisse medicos. augebo providentiam illorum. solam hanc artium Graecarum nondum exercet Romana gravitas, in tanto fructu paucissimi Quiritum attigere, et ipsi statim ad Graecos transfugae, immo vero auctoritas aliter quam Graece eam tractantibus etiam apud imperitos expertesque linguae non est, ac minus credunt quae ad salutem suam pertinent, si intellegant. itaque, Hercules, in hac artium sola evenit, ut cuicumque medicum se professo statim credatur, cum sit periculum in nullo mendacio maius. non tamen illud intuemur; adeo blanda est sperandi pro se cuique dulcedo. nulla praeterea lex, quae puniat inscitiam capitalem, nullum exemplum vindictae. discunt periculis nostris et experimenta per mortes agunt, medicoque tantum hominem occidisse impunitas summa est. quin immo transit convicium et intemperantia culpatur, ultroque qui perierunt arguuntur.

Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis 29.16-18

During a plague in the early years of the 3rd century BC, the Romans, prompted by an oracle in the Sibylline Books, sent an embassy to Greece to bring the cult-statue of Asculapius, the god of medicine, from Epidaurus to Rome. The god’s sacred snake also boarded the ship, and it swam ashore at the Tiber island. The temple of Asculapius was therefore built there, and the island was surrounded with stoneworks, traces of which are still visible, which gave it the appearance of a ship in commemoration of the god’s miraculous arrival. The emperor Claudius (ruled AD 41-54) decreed that if owners abandoned sick slaves on the Tiber island in order to avoid the cost of medical treatment, such slaves were to be free if they recovered, and should not be returned to their owners (Suetonius, Life of Claudius 25).

The Romans had a xenophobic prejudice against Greek doctors. Earlier in that same passage, Pliny quotes the elder Cato as saying:

The Greeks are a quite worthless and unteachable race. When they bestow their literature on us, they will destroy our whole existence. They will do this all the sooner if they send us their doctors. They have conspired to murder all non-Greeks with their medicine. They make us pay for treatment, so we will have the more confidence in them and they can ruin us the more easily.

Cato believed in old-fashioned remedies, regarding cabbage as almost a panacea; for instance, he recommended that, to ensure that infants grow up strong and healthy, they should be washed in the urine of someone who lived on a diet of cabbage (On Agriculture 157.10). Pliny also recalls that

during the rule of Nero, Thessalus rose to fame in the medical profession: he swept aside all received medical wisdom and denounced all doctors from every epoch with a sort of frenzy. You can get a clear idea of his sense of judgment and his attitude just by looking at his tomb on the Appian Way, where the inscription refers to him by the Greek term ἰατρονίκης (iatronikes “The Conqueror of Doctors”). No actor or charioteer went out in public accompanied by a larger throng (Historia Naturalis 29.9).

Galen, the most influential of all ancient doctors, was proudly and pompously Greek, but even he, writing a century after Pliny, was still criticising Thessalus for pandering to the Roman élite and promising to teach the art of medicine in six months:

now that medical credentials can be obtained effortlessly, shoemakers, carpenters, cloth-dyers and bronzeworkers have given up their trades and are arguing as to which among them is the best doctor” (On the Therapeutic Method 1.5).