Ido Israelowich. Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire

In his most recent study of Roman medicine, Ido Israelowich seeks to remedy what he sees as the “doctor-based approach” to ancient healing practices by setting aside medical theories and physiological models in order to focus on the actual experience of receiving healthcare in antiquity. Using Roy Porter's method of conducting “medical history from below” (“The Patient's View,” Theory and Society 14 [1985]: 175–98), Israelowich asks how patients in antiquity would have differentiated between the various actors within the so-called medical market place and endeavored to select a healer from among physicians, priests, pharmacologists, root-cutters, midwives, and trainers. He emphasizes that in a world without a licensing body, anyone could claim to be a physician, and doctors therefore needed to construct their own “authority” to attract clients, while “power” ultimately rested with the patient, who exercised it by paying someone to treat them. In doing so, Israelowich implicitly posits a consumer model of medicine, where healthcare is not a body of doctrine, but a saleable product purchased by a population motivated by a nexus of economic, religious, and political concerns. With this in mind, the book then illustrates how Rome transformed from an agricultural society in which the paterfamilias provided care to the members of his own household to an expansive empire that fully integrated the Greek “professional physician” into its civic structure. The considerable strengths of Israelowich's work rest in the ample archaeological, papyrological, and epigraphical evidence used to illuminate the legislative and administrative systems surrounding healthcare in antiquity.

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