Medical Culture and Learned Society in the High Roman Empire

• Applicant: Dr. Michiel Meeusen
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566903183

This project aims to develop an innovative approach to ancient Graeco-Roman medicine based on how learned, non-expert individuals interacted in its history. The project is provocative in its ambition to take the study of ancient medicine away from the professionals by introducing a lay perspective. In so doing, it calls for a more inclusive, less hierarchical approach to the available sources, which will further expand our knowledge of the ancient medical market place and the ways in which learned authors, as key stakeholders, tapped into it. Medicine was held in high regard in the High Roman Empire, a pivotal period in political and medical history (ca. 1st-2nd c.CE). Numerous eminent learned authors – including philosophers, sophists, scholars, politicians, even emperors – wrote extensively about medicine and health related topics, both in Greek and in Latin, and expected their readers to share that interest. The time is right for a revaluation of this thought-provoking phenomenon based on a thorough contextual reading of the available sources against the intellectual and social background of the High Imperial era. This can be done by taking into account both patient and doctor oriented perspectives, that is by critically comparing and contrasting literary and technical-medical sources, and also by raising a range of transhistorical questions still very relevant today. Indeed, many of the topics concerned in this project resonate very well with contemporary perspectives in academic fields other than the Classics: e.g. the sociology of health and illness, questions of medical ethics, reproduction, doctor-patient interaction, narratives of illness, societal aspects relating to knowledge production and circulation, medical professionalism and expertise. By studying the human body as an object of non-expert, elite knowledge and as a marker of societal normativity, the project aims to make a meaningful contribution to the wider political and intellectual resonance of ancient medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and beyond. In so doing, it will meaningfully contribute to our historical understanding of the mechanisms by which, in such societies, beliefs about medicine, the body and the efficacy of therapeutic measures circulated in wider society and how they gained acceptance and authority. What is the broader political and intellectual embedding of medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity? In what ways did medical knowledge trickle down in wider society and what are the driving causes? How were medical concepts and texts picked up in different learned discourse communities and for what reasons? How were they refashioned to suit different authorial agendas? How definitional was this process for the outlook of medicine itself qua science and indeed for the careers of the people who practiced it? And what does this say about the nature and development of medical science in the Roman Empire and in the history of medicine writ large?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Orly Lewis