Medicine and Metaphor in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This essay seeks to provide a framework for the four articles that follow. While the employment of medical metaphors by the writers of Late Antiquity has long been recognized, for medical historians the domains to which the metaphors are applied have remained largely in the background. Attention has tended to focus on the metaphors themselves and on the degree to which they reflect actual historical medical thought and practice. More recently attention has focused on the cultural, conceptual, and moral purpose of medical metaphors and how their employment might in itself be therapeutic. This article addresses three recent shifts in the way the role of medical metaphor is viewed, including its cognitive implications for the hearer.

Ancient Anatomy, Embryology, and the Gestation of Early Christian Heresy

“…60 Wendy Meyer has demonstrated how medical analogies of health or sickness of a single body reflected the health or sickness of individual souls. 61 Mary's spiritual superiority, then, and Jesus's divinity were tethered to the purity of Mary's physical bodynot just virginity but the painless birth and the nature of the pregnancy itself. Several ancient sources exhibit discomfort about Mary's pregnancy.…”

Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity

“…It was therefore normative for Hellenistic and Roman-era persons to think of virtue and health as equally dependent on bodily practices like diet, and normative for early Christian thinkers to use the same language and claim the same authority. 42 The cultural commonplaces of late antique medicophilosophical thought enable considerable slippage between literal and figurative meaning in the production of religious knowledge. 43 Like other ascetic theorists of the 4th century, Chrysostom deploys normative medico-philosophical concepts in his homiletic rhetoric of fasting and gluttony.…”