Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult Sir Geoffrey Lloyd Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult. By Bronwen L. Wickkiser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 178. $55 (hardcover). In as heavily researched a field as early Greek medicine, it is difficult to advance new lines of interpretation. Bronwen Wickkiser offers two original theses in Asklepios, Medicine and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece, both relating to the question of why the popularity of the cult of Asklepios increased so dramatically during the fifth century BCE. The first thesis is that the cult filled a need created by the refusal of lay doctors to treat what they considered to be incurable cases. The second suggests that the expansion of the cult served Athenian imperial interests. However, if both suggestions are substantially original, both face difficulties. Let me deal first with the first thesis. It certainly seems reasonable to us that certain patients would have recourse to divine medicine only after secular medicine had been found wanting. There are even a couple of pieces of direct evidence that some turned to Asklepios in desperation after other modes of treatment had failed: an epigram in the Palatine Anthology (6 330) ascribed to the orator Aeschines; the other an inscription (IG II2 4514) concerning a case of gout that no mortal is said to have been able to heal. But whether we should generalize from that evidence, and whether what seems a plausible scenario to us seemed so to the ancient Greeks themselves, are doubtful. First, there is the question of whether the kinds of doctors for whom we have evidence in the extant Hippocratic Corpus did have a definite, agreed policy about how to react to what they saw as incurable diseases. Wickkiser makes much of the evidence in On the Art that says that not to take on incurable cases is part of the definition of the medical art. While that treatise may or may not be by someone with firsthand medical experience, other treatises by practitioners [End Page 155] similarly suggest that treatment should be refused. (On Diseases II ch. 48 is one such text, and another may be On Diseases I ch. 6.) Wickkiser is aware that this attitude towards incurable disease was, as she puts it, neither unanimous nor unambiguous (p. 26). For example, she quotes On Joints ch. 63 and On Diseases of Women II ch. 110 as advocating treating even incurable ailments, and On Diseases I ch. 6 itself gives advice about the treatment to be used in such cases, thereby rather modifying its earlier advice to the doctor not to claim to be able to "fully cure" (exiēsthai ) what is incurable. Although there are plenty of texts that discuss this problem, Wickkiser makes detailed comments on only a relatively small sample. It therefore remains unclear to what extent lay doctors did turn away patients—who would then have recourse (whether in desperation or not) to Asklepios. The second difficulty with Wickkiser's claim about why patients turned to Asklepios relates to the types of cases treated in both secular and religious healing. Wickkiser argues that Asklepios "specialized" (in a sense) in chronic diseases. But there are plenty of discussions of chronic disease cases in the Hippocratic Corpus, including, for example, "gout" and "consumption" (phthisis). This indicates that lay medicine did attempt to alleviate such chronic conditions. Conversely, the inscriptional evidence from the shrines of Asklepios claims that many kinds of problem, both medical (from headaches to infertility) and nonmedical (such as losing a child) were solved by the god. Some inscriptions even describe surgical interventions—such as the removal of weapons—where again there is a clear overlap between lay and religious practice. Furthermore, there is not much recognition in this study that ancient patients were not limited to Asklepios on the one hand and the lay doctors represented in the Hippocratic writings on the other. There was an open competitive marketplace in early Greek medicine, but Wickkiser does not deal with the services of root-cutters or drug-sellers, nor...