Les medecins dans le monde grec: Sources epigraphiques sur la naissance d'un corps medical (review)

This is one of the most important books to be published on ancient medicine for a long time. Not only does it complete a task first essayed almost a century ago, but, at least for those who can read French or the classical languages, it also provides a clear starting point for new researches into the social history of medicine in the Greco-Roman world. It brings together all the inscriptions in Greek relating to doctors that have survived from the ancient world down to the sixth century of the Christian era. All are translated into French, and, where necessary, explicated in footnotes or in a series of complementary notes at the back of the volume. An introduction sets out some preliminary conclusions about the ancient doctor's education, social status, and activities both inside and outside medicine. The author neatly demonstrates the way in which the vocabulary used to commemorate doctors on inscriptions resonates with the literary treatises dealing with a doctor's proper behavior. If at times the discussion appears too bland, or fails to comment on matters that are unusual (e.g., the sculptured relief in no. 094) or controversial (e.g., the theory that links civic archiatri with the restriction of tax-immunity to only a few doctors around 150 ce), this hardly detracts from the enormous service the author has performed. Her repertory, like that of Danielle Jacquart on medieval French healers or Marie-Hélène Marganne on medical papyri (both also published by Droz) will be a standard work of reference for a long time to come.

Inscriptions are a necessary resource for the historian of ancient medicine. Chronologically they fill in the gap between the Hippocratic Corpus and the Galenic Corpus, and thematically they reveal much about the social role of the doctor that is omitted from most medical treatises. Although Herman Gummerus published his corpus of inscriptions from the Western half of the Roman Empire as long ago as 1932, and his list has been updated since, those written in Greek, most of which come from the Eastern half, are both more numerous and far more difficult to access, even in a major library. New finds are constantly being made—most, if not all, listed in the Bulletin Épigraphique or the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum—but much material still lurks in obscure archaeological journals and older publications. In 1909 Johann Oehler listed some 176 inscriptions, but he omitted much; and major finds, particularly in Turkey, have more than tripled that figure. Samama prints in full 524 inscriptions, some very fragmentary, to which may be added the doubtful cases in her Annexe and the seals noted on p. 588. It is a pity she did not include the handful of references to Greek veterinarians, or the inscription that accompanies a mosaic of a doctor and patient (J. Rom. Stud., 1945, 38: 158), although they do not fit her criteria for inclusion. Similarly, she may have decided that there were no good grounds for including even among the dubious inscriptions a possible honorary decree from Iasos (Annuario della Scuola Archeologica Italiana ad Atene, n.s., 1969-70, 31-32: 375 [cf. p. 197 n. 93]); or the very battered inscription from Austria (Wiener Studien, 1966, 79: 600). The same may be true for an apparent doctor inscription from Lechaeum near Corinth (Bulletin Épigraphique, 1967, no. 259), or for Aurelius Paulus of Apamea (Amer. J. Philol., 1927, 48: 33)—but the absence of an index of epigraphic sources, and the restriction of the indexes of Greek and of names to the printed texts, make it hard to be sure. Important inscriptions relating to Statilius Crito, for example, appear only in the notes to no. 246, to which perhaps may...