Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities ed. by Susan R. Holman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities ed. by Susan R. Holman
• C. L. Buckner

Susan R. Holman, Chris L. de Wet, Jonathan L. Zecher, editors
Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity: New Conversations for Health Humanities
Religion, Medicine, and Health in Late Antiquity 1
New York: Routledge, 2024
Pp. viii+186. $170.00.

To what extent can we understand early Christians as engaging in hazing culture? Is it possible for the lives of ancient ascetics to inform discourses concerning mental health? How does water access impact public health and the transformation of communities in antiquity and beyond? This volume of ten essays seeks to answer these questions and many more. Each contribution examines healing, medical, and health discourses from the second through the sixth centuries c.e., except for the tenth installment in which Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen responds to the entries authored by Susan Holman, Helen Rhee, and Chris de Wet. Drawing on a variety of postmodern theories and scholarship, the contributions seek to challenge contemporary approaches to reading late antique literature and to carve out a place for engaging modernity in conversations about the ancient world.

From the beginning, Anne Rebecca Solevåg reminds readers of the fraught nature of medical metaphor: “We should not assume a neat division between the domains of religion and metaphorical language, where medicine related to the literal body, while religion borrowed medical concepts to speak metaphorically about the health of the soul. Rather, both domains were concerned with the health of the body and soul” (14). Indeed, the multiple ancient medical discourses appearing throughout the volume exemplify how ancient exegetical authors, heresiologists, theologians, and hagiographers sought to treat the individual body, the social body, and the human soul simultaneously. This reality forces each contributor to imagine how medical conditions, procedures, or even the act of pathologizing the body or mind serve to circumscribe shame or virtue onto various bodies.

The work asks some of its most critical questions when it undermines associations of modern medicine with assumed progress or development. For example, Elisa Groff’s contribution employs the WHO’s standard of reproductive and sexual health in her discussion of Aëtius of Amida’s medical writing. She notes that Aëtius seeks to disassociate infertility from moral worth, a noble if not futile undertaking in a world that closely tied women’s societal value to their ability to produce viable offspring. In doing so, she draws attention to the specificity of Aëtius’s terminology (69–70), while simultaneously acknowledging the fraught nature of women’s reproductive and sexual health in antiquity and today. A similar conclusion emerges in Jonathan Zecher’s analysis of Alexander of Tralles’s approach to medicine. Zecher addresses the physician’s insistence that “natural remedies” that appear magical in nature—chants, amulets, rituals, and the like, but also plants or dietary changes—could be as efficacious as standard medical practice (84–94). Zecher ultimately calls into question what it means to be a “Christian” physician, the modern disdain to elements of Alexander’s work, and the very practice of the translation of ancient narrative medicine into our own [End Page 486] time. As he notes, “. . . we read Alexander (and other ancient healers) in tension. Unable to dismiss them, unable to idolize them, we read them in tension with our own commitments and concerns” (94).

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this work centers around its organization. Divided into three parts entitled “Marking Bodies, Making Communities” (Part One), “Defining Patients, Delimiting Communities” (Part Two), and “Performing Health, Preserving Communities” (Part Three), the sections force readers to tackle the complicated and often conflicting implementation of medical discourse as pertaining to individual health and well-being, as well as how an individual’s health status relates to the communities to which they belong. Chris de Wet’s contribution epitomizes these questions. As he notes, the “totalizing arrogation” of the early Christian medical discourse of the body and soul mirrors a similar discourse of the social body, so that individual subjects and larger social bodies are mapped and ordered (105–6). Whatever we may think of the ancient...