Doctors' literacy and papyri of medical content.

Abstract

The Hippocratic Corpus testifies to the existence of literate doctors, as well as to literate laymen interested in medicine, by the close of the fifth century BC. It is only in later Antiquity, however, that one can begin to speak with confidence about medical literacy encompassing a wide range of specific physicians and a lay public with valetudinarian interests. Evidence from the Roman province of Egypt, when coupled with testimony from Galen and others, is particularly helpful in the effort to sketch a portrait of writers and readers for medical texts. Of particular interest are the joins between the medical writers who have come down to us through the manuscript traditions, many of them practicing and lecturing to the elites of Rome, Alexandria, and eventually Constantinople, and the more ordinary practitioners and their students, friends, and neighbors in the towns and villages of Roman Egypt. My paper surveys texts on papyrus and other materials that bear witness to medical literacy: first, private letters that discuss medical matters; second, didactic texts that played a role in doctors' education, such as the catechisms (erōtapokriseis) and medical definitions; and third, collections of recipes, some of which receptaria were once rolls of many columns, while others are but a single sheet with one or two recipes. The some four hundred recipes written down in Roman and Byzantine Egypt emphasize the degree to which the same or similar therapeutic medicaments are shared with medical authors of the manuscript traditions from Dioscorides and Galen to Oribasius, Aetius, and Paul of Aegina.