Doctors and medicine in medieval England, 1340–1530

Nevertheless, his conclusion that "the social prestige ofthe physician in Rome, just as much as in contemporary Greece, was considerably elevated ('recht hoch')", seems to me in no way borne out by the facts, although I am prepared to see a gradual convergence between the two halves of the Empire. Some doctors are wealthy, friends of emperors, and local worthies, but, in general, they derive their social prestige from that of their patients, not their artper se. In a despotism like Rome, access to the despot gave power and wealth, whatever the legal status of the individual. Leaving aside the doctors of the court, I can find little evidence for wealth or social activity by doctors in the western half of the empire as compared with that in the East. Even if one makes allowance for the greater number of inscriptions recording civic activities in Asia Minor than in Italy, the overall pattern remains. At the level of the local council or the local religious organization, Roman doctors are less in focus than their counterparts in the Greek East. Dynasties of doctors are rare, and hence, too, that long-standing link with the public activities of one town: only Velia, with its Ouliads, can parallel Heraclea Salbace, let alone Cos with the Asclepiads, and significantly, Velia was a Greek colony in Greek Italy. Even after two or three centuries, the doctor in Rome and Italy was primarily an outsider. Secondly, opinions about doctors as friends or confidants must be treated with great caution, and can hardly be taken to say more than that successful doctors were, on the whole, liked. This banal conclusion may, perhaps, be avoided by a detailed comparison between doctors and other occupational groups, lawyers, architects or schoolmasters, for example, but, even here, it is doubtful what precision could be achieved other than that the doctor fell somewhere in the middle between a wealthy landowner and a peasant, although the social profile of lawyers seems to me to have been considerably higher than that of physicians. Kudlien, on the whole, rejects conclusions drawn from epigraphic evidence that point to this split between East and West. But he is less critical of his literary evidence. The frequency of woolworkers and tax-collectors in catalogues of abuse should cause one to hesitate before declaring Thessalus to be of low status on Galen's prejudiced evidence. Neither, given Galen's father's association with provincial …