Greek Doctor and Roman Patient
Authors: Huxley H. H. 
Published: July 2013

When Juvenal's friend Umbricius is enumerating the manifold occupations which will furnish a livelihood for a starving Greek, he places the practice of medicine between the skill of the tightrope-walker and the black art of the wizard. Though in this outburst he is stressing particularly the versatility of the race of Ulysses, we are entitled to give a liberal interpretation to the contemptuous diminutive Graeculus and to assume that the term is loosely used to comprehend all Greek-speaking aliens in Rome. The readiness of the Greeks to set up as doctors, the exaggerated respect they commanded, and the unsuitability of such a profession for the serious-minded Roman are set forth in a speech of that arch-enemy of Hellenism, Cato, preserved for us in Pliny's Natural History Certainly the doctors whose names appear in the poems of Juvenal, Martial, and Ausonius sound unmistakably Greek —Alcon, Diaulus, Dasius, Eunomus, Heras, Hermocrates, Herodes, Symmachus, and Themison. The low status of the physician is well brought out in those epigrams of Martial in which, with no appreciable difference in the modus vivendi, a doctor becomes an undertaker and an eye-specialist a gladiator. Phaedrus too has told us the instructive tale of the worthless cobbler who turned doctor. We are reminded of the facility with which the hero of Mr. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, who has, by becoming an assistant at a pets’ cemetery in the U.S.A., lost face with the English community, seeks a living as a non-sectarian minister. This comparison carries with it the implication that professional training was sometimes lacking; and indeed, if we exclude the medical handbooks, references to the student are as rare as Juvenal's black swan. But we all know Martial's complaint that, when as yet he was merely poorly, the imposition of a hundred chilly hands (the hands of Dr. Symmachus' apprentices) precipitated a genuine fever.5 Not merely financial success but a certain degree of respectability were of course acquired by many doctors who practised in Rome. In this connexion should first be mentioned Julius Caesar's gift of the citizenship to encourage practitioners to settle permanently in the City. Pliny importuned Trajan with a request that citizenship should be granted to the relatives of his physician. At the top of the profession were such men as Antonius Musa, the physician of Augustus, to whose medical skill and deserved imperial distinction adequate reference is made by the Emperor's biographer. Employment was clearly conditional upon satisfactory treatment. Cicero in a letter to Atticus uses a simile of the transfer of a patient from one consultant to another. The more affluent invalid could, as in a much later age Sidonius shows us, seek safety in numbers and health in the multiplication of remedies. For Sidonius alludes bitterly to the bedside wrangles of rival physicians. We should dearly love to know what happened at a ‘sick-parade’ in the medical quarters of a legionary camp but, our evidence being scanty and not of a personal nature, the subject must reluctantly be dismissed. Undoubtedly the epic treatment of Mago's spear-wound by the ancient Synhalus bears no resemblance to sober fact; nor are Punic practices a guide to Roman. Seneca, a more sober authority, contrasts the noisy outcries of recruits, albeit their wounds are merely superficial, with the quiet and patient endurance of veterans into whom the steel has gone deep. The latter, he says, behaved as if the affected limbs belonged to other people. Two uncongenial duties, which fell to the lot of certain doctors, call for brief mention. The first is their attendance on condemned criminals who were ordered to perform the happy dispatch with their own hands. In Nero's reign, Suetonius tells us, the expert would sever the veins of any who dawdled. The second assignment is connected with the business of the slave markets. The pitiable creatures, conspicuously placed on a wooden scaffold, naked and (if newly arrived from abroad) with whitened feet, bore suspended from their necks a certificate recording not merely name and aptitudes but imperfections both moral and physical. The discriminating buyer would, if he suspected significant omissions from the health sheet of the slave he fancied, supplement the testimony of eye and hand (for the men, women, and children were prodded like beasts at a cattle-mart) by taking medical opinion. The grisly scene is painted with great relish by Claudian in his onslaught on the eunuchconsul Eutropius.