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  • Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity
  • Peregrine Horden
Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity. By Gary B. Ferngren. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 246. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-801-89142-7.)

What has Cos to do with Jerusalem? Reworded, Tertullian’s famous question focuses on the relationship between early Christianity and the medicine associated with Hippocrates. No modern discussion of this can proceed very far without some reference to the writings of Darrel Amundsen and Gary Ferngren. For more than thirty years, both individually and in collaboration, they have offered overviews and particular studies of “healing and medicine in Christianity,” to quote their title in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Their articles, covering the Middle Ages as well as antiquity, are characterized by accessibility to the nonspecialist, full deployment of the secondary literature, a broad sociological framework, and sensitivity to current ethical issues. They also betray a deep familiarity with the primary evidence that is sometimes obscured by footnoting of translations only. Amundsen’s most influential papers were collected in Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Baltimore, 1996) and prefaced by a helpful typology of how medicine and religion can interrelate and how the early church Fathers viewed medicine (with nuanced approbation, not fundamental hostility). Now Gary Ferngren has at last followed suit. He reworks, and blends into a monograph, nine previously published papers, two of them written with Amundsen.

Early Christianity did not spread around the Roman world primarily because it was a religion of spiritual healing—miracles or exorcism. Not until the fourth century did miraculous healing become at all widely sought. Christianity was far more accurately and effectively (self-)advertised as a religion of charitable health care, first in times of crisis (epidemics), then, after 300, through its institutional poor relief (hospitals). Christians of the first five centuries did not necessarily consider illness to be the result of sin or of demonic possession. They readily consulted physicians, expecting to be treated in a naturalistic way. The Fathers, whose strictures on merely human medicine have usually been quoted out of context, in fact frowned on such secular consultations only in very precise circumstances.

Such have been some of the main arguments of Ferngren and Amundsen in their papers. Such are the arguments of this book. Anyone who already accepts them in outline and has propounded similar views (like this reviewer) will be pleased to see them set out in an elegant, connected, thoroughly documented way. In that sense the book pushes, almost too vigorously, at an open door. On the other hand, those who have, for instance, not previously been convinced by the author’s interpretation of the healing miracles in the Gospels, the standing in the early Church of the Epistle of James, or the polemics of Arnobius will probably not change their minds.

Even those sympathetic to Ferngren’s overall thesis may detect too forced a concern to present Christians as “regular guys” in the Mediterranean medical [End Page 566] world and a downplaying of that world’s diversity. Despite initial qualifications, medicine tends to be reduced in these pages too much to Hippocratic-Galenic medicine when there were so many alternatives. Religious healing tends also to be reduced to miracles and exorcism, forgetting that of the sacraments. Illness as theodicy or purification makes too few appearances. The medical aspect of pre-Constantinian clerical philanthropy (“a system of parochial care of the sick,” as it is rather optimistically called, p. 120) is overstressed by generalizing too hastily from the evidence of St. Cyprian of Carthage. But a good book, which this one is, should regenerate discussion rather than close it down. It deserves wide scrutiny. It also deserves a more suitable cover and fewer misprints.

Peregrine Horden
Royal Holloway, University of London
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