MEDICINE & MAGIC
Different Approaches to Healing
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The tension between academic medicine and magical healing was exacerbated by its blurry boundaries. Religious medicine too—the type of treatment sought from gods associated with healing such as Apollo or Asclepius—was seen as distinct from magical healing by the Romans; a self-professed academic doctor would have likely had a more approving reaction to a patient following the instructions in dreams from Asclepius than using amulets and incantations prescribed by a magical healer.
Votive relief depicting Asclepius and Hygieia presiding over a sacrificial procession. Greek, ca. 340–320 BCE. Marble. H. 49 cm; L. 90 cm. Musée du Louvre: Ma 755. Photo: © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Daniel Lebée / Carine Déambrosis / Art Resource, NY.
But all three practices—academic medicine, magical healing, and religious medicine—often interacted with one another. Magical and religious thinking were entrenched aspects of Roman culture, and, despite attempts to clearly characterize a scientific approach, much overlap existed.
The intersection between different healing modalities, even as academic medical doctors anxiously attempted to distinguish themselves from one another, predates Galen by centuries. In The Sacred Disease, one of the most well-known texts from the fifth-century BCE Hippocratic corpus, the author asserts that epilepsy has a physical rather than a divine or supernatural cause, as had previously been believed.
André Joseph Mécou (French, 1771–1837) after Jules Antoine Vauthier (French, 1774–1842) after a statue in the Musée du Louvre. Bust of Hippocrates. Late 18th–early 19th century. Stipple engraving. Wellcome Collection: 4231i. Photo: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0.
Despite the care taken to explicate the disease’s natural, humoral origins, the writer nonetheless expresses a devotion to the gods and writes favorably of purification rituals at healing shrines. Roman medicine exhibited a similar flexibility: even an arch-rationalist like Galen, while hostile to magical medicine, did not totally reject astrology and amulets, yet he did try to find a scientific explanation for the rare instances of their efficacy. Certain forms of therapeutics were more commonly associated with magical healing practices than others, and Galen ridicules potions and spells purported to influence dreams, manipulate thoughts, or cause people to fall in love— “stories not even useful for young boys.” Pharmaceutical remedies were often imported from exotic locales, and it was not uncommon for foreign magical-healing practices such as incantations and chants to find their way into drug recipes. Galen had little patience for such recommendations. But he had a more open mind when it came to religious medicine: he considered himself a devotee of Asclepius and even self-treated by following this healing god’s nocturnal prescriptions.
How doctors and patients negotiated these different yet frequently interacting healing options was conditioned by a wide variety of factors, ranging from the type of medical complaint to the social experience of the people involved. While the border between science and belief is sharper today than it was in antiquity, analogous scenarios are still common; a patient may receive standard Western medical care for an illness or injury and also pursue relief through complementary treatments such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, massage, herbs, or religious prayer. Then, as now, confidence in scientific medicine coexists with other belief systems.
