Myth: Christians Believed Not in Medicine But Only in Miracles

[I started a fundraiser on Facebook because of some recent illnesses I had that caused some nasty medical bills as well as income loss. I have been floored by the kindness I am being shown. In the midst, however, I received no less than two well intentioned but ultimately unhelpful messages implying that my sickness could be a reflection of my spiritual state. Now, there is no doubt that I am a sinner in desperate need of constant repentance. But, aside from the pastoral insensitivity, this type of link between the spiritual and the physical in health care is a gross distortion and simplification of how scripture and the Christian tradition have handled it. I have no time for a more in-depth look, but as fortune would have it I have several sections dealing with medicine in early Christianity in the book I am working on. I have posted a very short excerpt here. Enjoy!]

Another major casualty of historical misrepresentation that has produced long-lasting shockwaves in our understanding of the Middle Ages is the representation of its medicinal practices. As historian of medicine, science, and religion Gary Ferngren puts it, “erroneous assumptions about early Christian views of science, nature, and medicine have long bedeviled the study of the relationship between Christianity and medicine.”[1] Upon hearing “medieval medicine” one has, perhaps, already pictured plague doctors walking about in their ghastly beaked-masks and steam-punk goggles, or children singing “ring around the rosy” as a futile incantation against the plague. And so already, we stand bamboozled by later inventions projected backward like a movie reel upon the middle ages. For neither the beaked-mask, nor ring around the rosy, have their actual historical counterparts in the middle ages. The plague doctor is an artifact, as it happens, of the 17th century; ring around the rosy does not appear until the 1800s.[2]


In fact, the beaked-mask was never even a staple of medicinal practice even when it appeared, but was initially a mere concept proposed to King Louis XIII by his chief physician Charles de Lorme in 1619. The beak, designed to be filled with perfume and aromatic herbs, was meant to buffer the doctor from miasma—poisoned or corrupted air thought to be a prime vehicle for the transmission of disease. The design was so striking that it caught on—not as doctor’s garb, though there are perhaps a few cases where it was used—but as “Dr. Beaky” (yes, that is indeed his name), a sort of ghost-story that bemused adults used to scare children. “You believe its just a fable, what is written about Doctor Beaky,” reads an inscription from a 1656 engraving depicting horrified children fleeing before the beaked doctor (who also, if one looks closely, has for some unknown reason grown his fingernails into grotesque claws). “He seeks corpses to make a living … Ah, believe it, and don’t look away from here. … His purse is Hell, and gold is the soul he fetches …”[3] In reality, while getting sick in the middle ages was certainly not a good omen, medieval doctors were not ghouls but learned men and women who had a variety of intricate theories about diseases in general—including the plague—that were conversant with the Greek greats like Hippocrates and, especially, Galen. That these theories all turned out to be wrong or misguided does not suddenly make them irrational. In fact, most were born through careful—if ultimately misplaced—observation and medical theorization. 

[...]

Here the poor, the sick, the needy, are not merely objects of pity but are identified somewhat mysteriously as Christ himself. Few motivations could have been stronger for early Christians than to attend to Christ. Medicine and the opening of hospitals was, as such, not something merely fortuitous to the Christians of the time, but grew out of the core convictions of the gospel. Just as Christians overcome the prejudice against “banausic” professions, a similar prejudice was overcome in regards to medicine. Even by the 1st century Cicero, though well read in the medical discoveries of Galen and Hippocrates, was of the opinion that it was a debase profession for Roman nobels. Pliny the Elder similarly was uncomfortable with Romans needing the tutelage from Greeks, and so discounted the profession. It remained a practice occupied mainly by Greek slaves, although having found favor under Julius Caesar the profession rose in stature.[4] 

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Just a short time after Julian ["The Apostate's] brief reign as emperor, cities like Edessa especially in the Roman East had “adopted the tenets of the new Christian welfare,”[5] and according to early Church historians like Sozomenus (A.D. 400-450) by 373 xenodocheion or xenon—“guest houses” or shelters—had been built for the needy and the sick amidst both famine and plague. Edessa, moreover, was also the locus of “extensive translation projects that sought to render Greek documents, including theological and medical treatises” into Syriac.[6] Indeed, it was the Eastern Christian monks and their xenon that supplied the most comprehensive and cutting edge medical care available.[7] Though the Byzantine xenons and their origins in Christian philanthropy have been overlooked or dismissed by most scholars, to write about them is in fact “to write the first chapter in the history of the Hospital itself.”[8] That they have not received such study is no doubt evidence of the double shock of this claim: the overcoming of the general prejudice that anything medieval could be the precursor to our contemporary scientific ways, and the overall shock among Anglo-Saxon scholars that anything good could come out of Byzantium.

Yet, much of this has been lost, or indeed erased through neglect, misunderstanding and—as we are about to see—blatant misrepresentations. One reigning assumption among scholars has been that since medicine was based upon the figure of Christ as healer, Christianity must have had a purely miraculous view of healing, and a completely demon-driven view of illness. Thus Ulrich Mueller can write in his history of medicine that “[T]he dominant view of the New Testament is that demons are the cause of sickness.”[9] Certainly, while this “pan-demonological” interpretation as one scholar calls it is not accepted by all New Testament scholars or historians of early Christianity, it is “the currently dominant narrative”[10]as Gary Ferngren notes. 

Yet nothing is further from the truth in terms both of the text of the New Testament, or of its historical application. To approach the actual reality is not merely pulling a few steps back from such a “pan-demonological” interpretation, but to realize that apart from a few exceptional cases demons are never accused in Scripture or in early Christianity of being at the root of illnesses. A close reading of the New Testament alone testifies to this, even before one gets to broader Christian history. While there are three cases where illness and demonic possession overlap, the majority of cases readily distinguish Jesus’ healing from exorcisms.[11]

There is, moreover, a remarkably naturalist description of the etiology (that is, the origin and cause) of disease. Even in cases of epilepsy—which is often used as a classic example of a natural illness being mistaken for possession—the majority of cases were given purely physiological explanations by Christians, following the earlier diagnoses of the Hippocratic treatise Sacred Disease.[12] Yes, demons could in fact cause disease or at least manifest parallel symptoms, but these were incredibly rare even in the New Testament, where the confrontation with demons was believed to be much more numerous than normal due to the peculiar apocalyptic nature of Christ’s ministry. 

And yes, prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing with oil should be utilized for the sick. But these were in concert with the practice of physicians, not in competition with them. In the normal course of things, demons were an unusual and exceptional circumstance, and not one conflated with medicinal diagnoses. As such no antagonism existed between the notion of Jesus’ healing and that of normal physicians: “in the New Testament no condemnation of physicians or medicine, either specific or implied.”[13]Just the opposite. Christ’s compassion toward the suffering fueled an early and aggressive Christian interest in “secular” medicinal treatises and practices, as we already alluded to above. And yet, to summon Charles Freeman’s Closing of the Western Mind from the dustbin, he jeers that the rise of Christianity led to “the rejection of a scientific approach to medicine.”[14] This is echoed as well in Richard Gordon’s 1993 The Alarming History of Medicine where, because of Christianity, “anatomy was dead, and medicine was stillborn. … [Christianity] scuppered healing for fifteen centuries.”[15]

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[1] Gary Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), 3.

[2] Black, The Middle Ages, 213-240.

[3] Black, The Middle Ages, 226.

[4] See Miller, The Birth of the Hospital, 30-49.

[5] Risse, Mending Bodies, 72. 

[6] Risse, Mending Bodies, 73.

[7] They key study on this remains Timothy S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997).

[8] Miller, The Birth of the Hospital, 4-5.

[9] Quoted in Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, 42.

[10] Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, 42.

[11] See Ferngren’s analysis, Medicine & Health Care, 42-63.

[12] Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, 57.

[13] Ferngren, Medicine & Health Care, 48.

[14] Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, 320.

[15] Quoted in Black, The Middle Ages, 173.