RELS 214 Medicine, Magic, Miracle: Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean
This course orients students to the fields of medicine, magic, and miracle in the ancient Mediterranean (5th century BCE- 5th century CE). We will start by studying the ways people experienced, understood, and responded to illness and suffering. Then we will explore the options available to them as they sought help in the “healthcare marketplace”: physicians, “midwives,” druggists, ritual experts (aka "magicians"), or religious healers. Consulting a range of sources—such as medical treatises, folk remedies, religious texts, “magical” recipes and spells, and archaeological evidence—we will seek to understand their distinctive views about the cause and treatments of illness, as well as the bitter competition between healers. We will see that ancient rhetorical strategies to malign competitors—strategies that mobilized already well-defined social differences along political, gendered, classed, religious, and ethnic lines—created impressions of and hierarchies between medicine, religion, and magic that persist still today.