Ser médico e aprender Medicina na Lusitânia romana

Abstract

366

By choosing a pertinent topic to the History of Medical Sciences, those who dedicate themselves to the study of Roman Lusitania will certainly see the analysis of doctors socio-juridical status as an obvious option. Although the traditional topic of data scarcity can be applied to this subject, we have, nevertheless, a substantial set of archaeological and epigraphic data that allow us to draw a representation of the matter. Among the available documents, an exceptional inscription recently discovered in the capital of Lusitania (Edmondson, 2009), draws attention to some interesting elements to understand the process of medical training in a Roman provincial context. The remaining inscriptions, that sometimes quite suggestively also appear in classical literature, have the great advantage of presenting concrete examples of doctors, of whom we know the name and some particular aspects of their lives, and in which we can find explicitly or implicitly their social status. Moreover, what is known of the wide repository of epigraphs of the Roman world that refer to doctors, allow us to complete the picture and serve of parallel to this particular reality of the extreme west of the empire.

Keywords

doctors, medical training, servile status, freedman, links Olisipo-Emerita