Communicating disease, care and healing. The role of medical inscriptions and patient reports in temple medicine from classical antiquity to the roman imperial age

Abstract

AbstractThe use of the term “irrational”, when interpreting ancient and contemporary medical systems, is generally based on a bipolar, perhaps two-party, ideological systematization. This is a perspective behind which there is a reifying ideology that defines medical knowledge based on divination and symbolic practices as “irrational”. Moreover, they are seen as systematized “beliefs”. However, this approach neglects the extent to which rituals permeate all practices, including those of contemporary biomedicine. Even in the case of ancient medicine, concepts of the natural and the spiritual are not, therefore, connoted as a clear watershed between the rational and the irrational in the reductive sense described above. On the contrary, they are conjugated in a manner that coexists within the same medical system. Starting from this interpretative foundation, it is possible to trace practices of rational medicine in the temples of Asclepius, in accordance with the late testimonies of Hippocratic medicine. Consequently, this paper focuses on demonstrating the continuity between temple medicine and “rational medicine” through the communication strategy of the iamata (sanationes) as well as the reports of special patients, such as Aelius Aristides. In addition, the article highlights the political role of writing as a way to regulate the healing not only of the body but also of the civic body. This approach is perfectly consistent with the ancient wisdom and philosophical tradition of overlapping state and body, politics and medicine, lawgivers and physicians.

Keywords

• temple medicine
• medical inscriptions
• Asclepius
• Aelius Aristides
• iamata