ABSTRACT
When, around AD 70, the Elder Pliny surveyed the development of medicine in his Natural History, he composed a devastating indictment of his fellow Romans and their Greek doctors. As we have seen, he saw the transplantation of Greek medicine to Rome as an index of moral decline, the triumph of luxury over old Roman virtues.1 Now, blown along by every passing fancy, his fellow citizens put their faith in healers who offered novelty rather than sound prospects of health. Cold-water cures were succeeded by astrological dietetics as the fashionable therapy of the day, and this in turn by cold baths.2 Each healer put forward his own pet theory in order to gain patients. Most notorious of all in Pliny’s eyes was Thessalus of Tralles, the Methodist whose memorial among the select graves on the Appian Way bore the epithet iatronikes, ‘champion physician’. Whether in public or at the bedside, confrontation took over from co-operation, disagreement from shared diagnosis, and public morality collapsed along with private health.3
