Religion, Medicine, and Health

Abstract

This chapter explores a number of the many intersections between religion, medicine, and health in Late Antiquity. It does so by both focusing on continuities with earlier periods and by highlighting the ways in which religious, cultural, and social change in the late Roman Mediterranean affected the profession of medicine, approaches to healing, and notions of sickness and health. Three categories of healing expertise (medical, divine, and shamanic/ad hoc/“magical”) persist in the Christian Mediterranean, albeit with some important changes in terms of the kinds of sacred figures invoked and the personnel who perform certain ritual healing practices. Both rabbis and bishops extended medical theories into the domains of theologizing and ritual practice as one strategy for establishing themselves as religious authorities and master diagnosticians of a wide variety of conditions, characterized by spiritual, psychic, and physical dimensions.

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