Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity

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DESCRIPTION: The aim of the proposed investigation is to write a history of medicine and health-care in early Christianity. The first chapter will describe how Christian attitudes to healing developed in a cultural milieu in which Greek medicine and religious healing were seen as complementary. The second chapter will explore the relationship of medicine and miracle in early Christian healing. I shall argue that most Christians accepted natural modes of healing, whether rational or within a tradition of folk medicine. Chapter three will trace the growth of Christian philanthropy, initially centered in the individual congregation, which created an effective means of providing medical care for those within the Christian community. I shall suggest that hospitals, which constituted a distinctively Christian contribution to health-care, developed in the fourth century out of a long tradition of caring for the sick within a parochial context. Chapter four will trace the history of lay orders of care-givers that were created in the large cities of the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. They were effective in providing emergency care in urban areas that were without any systematic or organized efforts to treat plague victims. Chapter five will discuss the development of a specifically Christian form of medical ethics, which incorporated earlier Hippocratic medical ethics but modified them at important points and situated them within the framework of Christian theology. The concluding chapter will attempt to recreate the early Christian understanding of disease, in which Christians viewed sickness and physical disability as part of the natural order in a world that was under the dominion of sin and yet providentially ordered by God. I shall argue that there existed tensions as well as compatibilities that were latent, if not always evident, in early Christian attitudes to medicine and healing. The goal is a substantial book-length manuscript that will constitute a comprehensive study of medicine and health-care among the Christian communities of the first five centuries of their existence.