Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity by Gary B. Ferngren

While this might appear to be a rather niche topic there is in fact a wider application.  It becomes clear that the root of the “Science versus Religion” debate comes from the assertion that Christianity rejected the proto-scientific medical practice of the Greco-Roman world in favour of a reliance on “faith” healing.  This idea has then been extrapolated out to a belief that Christianity is fundamentally anti-scientific.  Ferngren by showing that there is no evidence for the Christian rejection of contemporary medical practice also acts to undermine the wider argument that science and Christianity are incompatible.

This is most definitely an academic work – for example while the main body is just 150 pages long it is followed by 90 pages of notes and bibliographic references etc, which seems a pretty high ratio to me.  It also reads like a PhD thesis and a large part of content is a commentary on other writers, both ancient and modern, of whose ideas the reader is assumed to have a working knowledge (and which I mostly didn’t – this left me having to take a lot of Ferngren’s arguments on face value but thankfully it didn’t render those arguments unintelligible).

Ferngren’s main argument is that the interpretation of Scriptural and other Early Christian writings are flawed.  The usual assumption is that the predominance of “faith” healings of one kind or another within these writings is indicative of the same predominance within the Christian Communities.  But Ferngren’s suggests that such writings are instead capturing the exception occurrences and are largely silent on the normative practice which as a common place was not seen as worthy of comment.  To support this, through the examination of accounts of healing in the Christian writings, Ferngren identifies evidence to show that generally it was only after the recourse to ordinary medicine had failed to achieve healing that some form of “faith” healing was sort. 

The other challenge that the Ferngren provides is to the assumption that the normal explanation for illness was either divine punishment or the action of demons – this is shown simply by offering an unbiased reading which looks only at the early writings rather than reading the beliefs of the high Middle Ages backwards.

One of the most interesting aspects is the way Ferngren’s argues that charity as we understand it was a particular idea of the Jewish people and unknown in the Greco-Roman world until it was spread by the growth of Christianity.  This is interesting because it seems that charity is at one level hard wired into our society and yet at another that it is becoming an increasingly contested idea – private charity might continue to be encouraged but the idea that the state should act with charity towards either citizens or not-citizen residents is being rapidly diminished.