MEDICINE

MEDICINE. Use of medical texts of antiquity by the Church Fathers (q.v.), especially Galen, and its influence on their thinking, has been recognized only recently. Certainly, the image of Christ as “physician of souls and bodies” is very ancient, as is the description of spiritual counsel and repentance in language drawn from the practice of medicine. Thus, Joh n Climacus and Symeon the New Theologian (qq.v.), for example, will speak of repentance and confession (q.v.) as the medicine of the soul and of the work of the spiritual father (q.v.) as equivalent to that of a physician.

The practice of medicine in the Byzantine era (q.v.) was dependent on the ancients, though not without additions on the basis of experience. Nowhere else in the medieval Christian world does one find medical competence on the level of Byzantium’s (q.v.). Popular medicine, however, included generous doses of magic, to which professional physicians were not immune either, and hence comes under occasional Church scrutiny and censure throughout the period. (See Healing.)