"First Do No Harm": Evaluating the Theatrical in Hippocratic Medicine

 

The Hippocratic physician was one who was in open competition for work, as patients would ask for the opinions of multiple available physicians. He was also competing with other healing arts (such as healing cults, and the conservative Roman patres familiarum). In addition to this, their art was complicated by the medicinal restrictions of the day, and the understandable unpredictability of each case.

In such a complex system, it is easy to understand how a physician would have a difficult time proving his skill. A doctor who was unfortunate enough to have a sequence of terminal patients, or whose patients failed to take his advice and never recover, or whose peers are simply more eloquent may quickly lose the major weapon in his arsenal: his reputation. In addition, the physicians as a group also faced a veritable tarnish on their collective reputation from the quacks and mountebanks that seemed to plague commercial districts.

To combat this, doctors developed a form of theatrics combined with some traditional lore about disease which they could use to persuade patients to hire them as their healer, to obtain a position as a civic physician, and to instruct medicine to students and the public.