Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity by Helen Rhee (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity by Helen Rhee
• Meg Leja

Helen Rhee. Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2022. xvi + 352 pp. $49.99 (978-0-8028-7684-3).

Rhee tackles a complicated topic in this study of how early Christians developed their own narratives of illness and approaches to healing as they engaged with Greco-Roman philosophical writings and rational medical traditions. In this, she builds on her previous books, which examine the formation of Christian communities in the late Roman Empire, focusing in particular on questions of poverty and wealth.

The book's structure is clearly conveyed in the title, with five chapters that cover illness, pain, and health care in either "Greco-Roman" or "early Christian" culture. Chapter 1 treats understandings of disease and health in Greek and Latin works by Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Plutarch, Aelius Aristides, and Marcus Aurelius, while chapter 2 examines the same themes in ancient and late antique Jewish and Christian religious texts. Chapter 3 demonstrates Christian continuity with Galenic and Stoic conceptions of pain even as Christians reevaluated suffering as a positive force in uniting a community. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 take up the provision of bodily healing within Greco-Roman temple and popular medicine [End Page 642] and then Christian communities both before and after the legalization of the religion under Constantine in 313 CE. Though Rhee acknowledges that Christian identity was "essentially relational" (p. 2), her methodology tends to treat Greco-Roman and Christian as stable, demarcated categories, with only brief attention to identity formation in the context of internal conflicts, as (for instance) between orthodox and Gnostic Christians or Galenic adherents and the Methodists. In her discussion of a third- or fourth-century Greek charm for uterine suffocation (p. 216), translated and analyzed by Christopher Faraone, Rhee notes the blending of Galenic theory and magical healing but says nothing about the common ground shared by Greek, Jewish, and Christian exorcisms that is suggested here. In such manner, the book does little to challenge ingrained categories of "pagan" and "Christian" or "rational" and "popular" medicine.

In the introduction Rhee states that she will concentrate on the second through fifth centuries (p. 1), but her thematic interests draw her far earlier in scope, back to the Tanakh and Second Temple literature as well as the Hippocratic Corpus. Although, when it comes to the Church Fathers, she deals with several fifth-century thinkers—Augustine (d. 430 CE), John Cassian (d. 435 CE), and Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. 457 CE) all appear in chapter 2—with regard to medical writings Rhee prioritizes authors of the second century over those of the fourth or fifth. Thus, chapters 1, 3, and 4 devote significant space to exploring notions of disease, pain, and treatment according to Galen and his predecessors but mention only Caelius Aurelianus when it comes to post-Galenic physicians or philosophers. In this vein, the texts that Rhee highlights are fairly predictable and well-known. It left me wondering why Rhee did not follow through on restricting her study to the second century and later and investigate issues through the lens of textual transmission. In this scenario, the book would not have needed to review ideas of health in the Hippocratic Corpus, but it could have probed which Hippocratic writings were most familiar to Roman intellectuals of the third century (non-Christian and Christian alike) and how individuals of that time read and interpreted these ancient texts according to distinct religious affiliations.

One of the greatest strengths of this book is its ability to situate itself at the intersection of many fields of historiography. One of its greatest weaknesses is that it does not make evident what it contributes to a robust line of scholarship on Christian attitudes toward Hippocratic and Galenic "rational medicine." Scholars such as Owsei Temkin, Judith Perkins, Vivian Nutton, Gary Ferngren, and Andrew Crislip have already set forth provocative and persuasive arguments about the fate of Greek medical theory in a Christianized Roman Empire and the means by which Christians defined themselves as a body of co-sufferers and a religion of healing.¹ Rhee is certainly...