MEDICINE AND HEALTH CARE IN EARLY CHIRSTIANITY. By Gary B. Ferngren. 246 pp. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. $35.00

Excerpt

This book provides an account of Christian healing and medical philanthropy during the first five centuries of the Christian era. Its author, Gary B. Ferngren, is a historian at Oregon State University who approaches his investigation of ancient Greek and early Christian sources using the “historical-philological method” (p. 7). While strongly affirming that early Christian writers were conditioned by the social and historical context of Hellenistic culture, the author declines to reduce healing stories to socially constructed realities and philanthropic practices to ideological gestures. Instead, he acknowledges the formative role of epidemiologic realities—and, especially, the role of major epidemics that beset Mediterranean cities during the second and third centuries—and he regards Christian accounts of healing and medical philanthropy as, at least partly, practical attempts to grapple with real health problems using the resources of an emergent theological tradition. This approach reflects the author’s interest in science and religion as evidenced by a book he previously edited, Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, also published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (2002). …