Health in Antiquity (review)

Many of the fourteen articles gathered here focus not so much on the elusive concept of health but on its alter ego, disease. Charlotte Roberts et al. survey paleopathology and offer an homage to the discipline's early exponent, J. L. Angell, though this general account is oddly placed after Robert Arnott's reconstruction of disease epidemiology in the prehistoric Aegean world. Arnott associates patterns of disease not only with malarial marshes and other environmental factors but also with the historical and archaeological record, as does Sherry C. Fox in her comparative case study of two later sites; this is an essentially correlative approach that is not always convincing. Ray Laurence discusses some victims of Vesuvius not only as groups—people at well-fluoridated Herculaneum had better teeth than those of Pompeii—but as individuals in a particular cultural milieu. A leisured but muscle-bound man, for instance, suggests a particular bodily aesthetic. Neville Morley analyzes the ecology of the Roman city, concluding that though the safest place in the empire was the countryside, even the disease hub of Rome was more survivable than were medieval or many Third World cities.

A second group of articles deals much more directly with the concept of health (hygieia) in Greco-Roman societies. Helen King examines possible meanings of this term for the women discussed in Hippocratic gynecological texts. Although for these authors female health is highly normative, they seem to have recognized it as somewhat separate from reproductive capacity. However, female experience and authoritative male assessment of what made a healthy female may have coincided only at vital points of social functionality such as fertility. Gillian Clark analyzes late philosophical and Christian attitudes to health and the requirements of the body in relation to their focus on spiritual development: is it the body or illness that represents the worse distraction from God, and is the body ultimately more vital to the Christian project of redemption than it is to the Platonist aim of separation? The last article, by the late Dominic Montserrat, discusses the bishop Sophronius's account of the miracle cures of two martyrs. The text provides a window onto contemporary rivalries and the relationship between medicine and the miraculous.

The Greeks personified "health" as the goddess Hygieia. Emma Stafford gives a thorough account of the early history of this cult and its association with the healing god Asclepius. John Wilkins attempts to site both goddess and concept in cultural contexts, such as the association of hygieia with symposia, and the dietary advice of doctors.

Of the rest, Ralph Jackson provides an account of the instruments of bone surgery that, though an excellent essay of its kind, seems out of place. Nicholas Vlahogiannis explores literary and inscriptional evidence for attitudes to disability, finding its sufferers marginalized and associated with the divine, usually in terms of punishment. Karelisa Hartigan and Peter Barefoot approach Asclepieia from the perspectives of modern healing practices. The latter points out that sanctuaries were pleasant places; Hartigan speculates that the theaters often located near Asclepieia were used for dramatic enactments of the god's dream cures. However, dreams in the medical work Regimen IV have not therapeutic, as she claims, but diagnostic value, being produced by current states of the body.

There are few errors or irritations, though the same hymn to health is translated twice in successive articles and many of Angell's works listed as an appendix to chapter 2 reoccur in the general bibliography. Conference collections are rarely bywords for thematic coherence, perhaps especially after seven years and two editors since the original 1998 seminar, but most of the papers gathered here can and will be usefully mined for specific purposes.