Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire

Abstract This book juxtaposes the fields of medicine and law in the ancient Roman world and suggests that they were shaped thoroughly and idiosyncratically by the particular needs and desires of both their practitioners and their users. The volume approaches the study of these fields through three avenues. First, it argues that the literatures produced by elite practitioners, like Galen or Ulpian, were not merely utilitarian, but were pieces of aesthetically inflected literature and thus carried all of the disparate baggage linked to any form of literature in the Roman context. Second, while one element of that literary luggage was the socio-political competition that these texts facilitated among their authors, such high-stakes agonism also uniquely marked the quotidian practice of both medicine and law, resulting in both fields coming to function as forms of popular public entertainment. Finally, the effects of rhetoric and the deeply rhetorical education had by the elite made themselves constantly apparent in both the literature on and in the practice of medicine and law. Through case studies in both fields on these topics, together with contextualizing essays, the volume suggests that the blanket results of all this will have been profound. Ultimately, the book poses forward-looking questions: What things might ancient Roman medicine and law have been meant and/or geared to accomplish in their world? And how might the very substance of Roman medicine and law have been crafted with an eye to fulfilling those peculiarly ancient needs and desires?