Popular Medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Explorations by W. V. Harris (review)

This edited volume, which comes out of a conference held at Columbia University on April 18–19, 2014, aims to redress the "pervasive if not unanimous refusal" (p. vii) in scholarship on ancient medicine to examine systematically "popular medicine."^* In the preface, this gap is attributed to the fact that the bulk of evidence concerns "elite/learned/rationalistic" medicine (p. vii) and to some scholars' apparent denial of popular medicine's existence. The thirteen chapters in the collection describe the practices and practitioners often associated with the sphere of "popular medicine" across the expanse of Greco-Roman antiquity—from the classical period to late antiquity. While the introduction argues for a "dividing line" (p. 15) between "rationalistic" and "popular" medicine, the contributions in the volume appear to undercut this position.

"Popular medicine" is a monolithic term that suggests a distinctive approach to health care. The chapters in this book, however, highlight the difficulty of pinning down exactly what makes a practice or practitioner "popular." A range of synonyms are used in the essays of this volume to gloss the meaning of "popular," including "widespread" (p. 90), "medico-magical" (p. 128), "traditional" (p. 11), "folk" (p. 65), "native" (p. 163), "civilian" (p. 225), "religious" (p. 95), "lay" (p. 148), and "practical" (p. 93). As certain chapters show, some of these words apply to popular medicine only in specific contexts. For instance, in her chapter on "Representations of the Physician in Jewish Literature," Catherine Hezser argues that the Palestinian rabbis distinguished popular modes of healing, which they connected with magic and idolatry, from their own participation in religious medicine, which was guided by halakhah. Therefore, in their culture, "religious" and "popular" practices of medicine are not synonymous, even if they sometimes overlapped.

Several of the chapters try to reach a workable definition of popular medicine through antithesis: it is "non-elite" (p. 46) rather than elite; "irrational" (p. 199) rather than rational; "non-scientific" (p. 199) as opposed to scientific; and unorthodox as opposed to "orthodox" (p. 15). Laurence Totelin makes the judicious point that the dividing line between, for example, the orthodox and the unorthodox "depends on where one stands" (p. 78). She explains that to popular practitioners such as drug sellers, the complicated theories of the elite doctor Galen may appear marginal or even unorthodox. Accordingly, the contingency of such negative definitions suggests that ancient sources and communities may have held conflicting views of what constituted "popular medicine." Citing the plurality and fluidity of healing practices in Greco-Roman antiquity, Vivian Nutton understandably raises doubts about the value of categories such as "popular" and "folk" medicine (p. 272).

Rebecca Flemming comes to a similar conclusion in her illuminating study of anatomical votives, which was a socially inclusive phenomenon in the Roman world. She advises that the disappearance of anatomical ex-votos from Italy from the early first century BCE should not be interpreted as a sign of "mortal" (p. 123) medicine's victory over divine (perhaps "popular") cures. Rather, as she notes, the healing options after this period expanded in a "non-exclusive and often collaborative way" (p. 123). Therefore, this sharing of medical knowledge begs the question whether it is sensible to speak of a "popular" medicine in contrast to a "high" medicine.

Social inclusivity is also a theme of David Leith's examination of the diffusion of sectarian (e.g., Empiricist and Methodist) medicine. His contribution challenges the assumption that sectarian medicine is "high" medicine (p. 231) because its practitioners treated elite patients in provincial capitals. He demonstrates that, while students may have traveled to urban centers such as Alexandria to learn from famous heresiarchs, most were not able to achieve the same degree of success among wealthy clientele as their instructors. Thus, for financial reasons, they returned to their own hometowns. Leith utilizes papyrological and epigraphical evidence to reveal how some pupils of sectarian medicine lived in small villages far away from major cities...