Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction by Gary B. Ferngren (review)

The aim of Medicine and Religion is to provide “a concise but comprehensive survey that traces the history of the intersection of medicine and healing with religious traditions in the Western world from the earliest civilizations . . . to our own era” (p. x), intended for nonspecialist readers. Drawing on a vast body of classic and recent scholarship, including his own decades-long research, Ferngren offers those who wish to “gain an understanding of the place of religion in the Western medical and healing traditions” (p. x) a very rich picture of such interaction, based on the assumption that religion has always complemented medicine in whatever ways humans have historically confronted illness and disease.

The book is organized in eight chapters in chronological order, preceded by an introduction and followed by an epilogue. Chapter 1, on “The Ancient Near East,” treats ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hebrew cultures; a chapter is devoted respectively to “Greece,” “Rome” (unsurprisingly the best chapter, given Ferngren’s field of expertise), and “Early Christianity,” which examines healing in the New Testament and the early Church. The narration then unfolds to “The Middle Ages,” covering nearly a millennium from ca. 500 to 1400, with a further chapter coauthored with Madieh Tavakol on “Islam in the Middle Ages.” As the book proceeds, since it is primarily addressed to a North American readership, religion becomes increasingly Reformed Christianity, and chapters 6, on “The Early Modern Period,” and 7, on “The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” focus mainly on Protestant Europe and North America.

Thematic threads recurring along this very broad survey include religious accounts for suffering and explanations of disease; medical ethics; spiritual medicines and the ways in which natural, religious, and magic remedies were resorted to in various cultures; assistance to the sick and the dying. Ferngren’s account is based on Darrel Amundsen’s “configurations” of religion and medicine over time:¹ (1) medicine subsumed under religion; (2) medicine and religion’s partial separation; (3) complete separation; (4) religion subsumed under medicine, although he rightly warns readers against the idea that secularization is a linear, irreversible process and points at the fact that “even today the religious beliefs of many Westerners intersect with the culture of healing and health care in surprisingly traditional ways” (p. 2).

Given such framework, the focus shifts from a general, anthropological account of the role of religion in the theodicies and healing practices of ancient societies to the enumeration of instances in which faith has motivated and sustained individual and collective endeavors toward the sick in the early modern and modern Christian West. Ferngren posits a beneficial role of Christianity in the development of medicine inasmuch as it fostered medical philanthropy and led to the creation of hospitals and other forms of assistance unknown to the ancients. This passed on to Islamic culture, but remained a feature of Christianity up to the present. As Ferngren underscores, modern nursing, for instance, cannot be accounted for if its religious motivation and origin are neglected.

One cannot but admire the scholarly mastery with which Ferngren summarizes two and a half millennia in a study of merely two hundred pages. Of course, in such an embracing overview, some oversimplifications are inevitable, for instance the way in which universities and the premodern corporate organization of medicine and their relation to the Church are addressed in chapters 5 and 7. The use of notions such as “prescientific medicine” (p. 162) would have required at least a caveat. Although Galenism and humoral medicine are sketched, no explanation is provided for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanical and vitalist medicine, so that the reader cannot really figure how these new interpretations of the body played a part in the secularization of the modern worldview.

But it would be somewhat unfair to focus on such omissions, as Medicine and Religion is “neither a history of medicine nor a history of religion” (p. ix). Altogether it does indeed provide a historical introduction for...