ClassicsFiend

For those of you particularly interested in this subject, I'd like to recommend Andrew Crislip's From Monastery to Hospital (or via: amazon.co.uk). He's very interested in detailing the "sick role" in Egyptian monasteries and includes a lot of interesting discussions about monastic health care. Monks in late antiquity received excellent, up-to-date medical treatment for their time period, and by the time you get to Basil the Great you can see more public care and attempts to destigmatize illness.

I'm not sure about medical "advances," but this book does include an amazing story about a monk who gets gangrene in his crotch and -- out of extreme piety -- keeps it to himself until he can't take a leak anymore. Fortunately there are good enough doctors to set him up so that he can pee through a lead tube for the rest of his life.

Sometimes I look at what I've been reading and worry about myself.

Roger Pearse

No, I quite understand. But without references the most interesting subject is hard to pursue further, you see.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

mountainman

In the fourth century, when Christianity was created
by Constantine, the medical system of antiquity had
been running out of many distributed temples to Asclepius.

Constantine is known to have destroyed these temples
and executed the priests, and in some cases (eg: Antioch),
before the "Council" of Nicaea.

When Constantine created the new and strange Roman
religion (not Greek) he legislated for the burning and
destruction of the writings of prominent academics
such as Porphyry and Arius, and by the end of the
fourth century, the new christian religion had almost
totally destroyed and burned the magnificent libraries
of the empire, containing the knowledge and writings
of perhaps a millenium.

The new religion and its associated persecution and
intolerance, imperially inspired and ratified, caused
the dark ages.