Medicine and Empire in the Roman World

Shows how medicine – ideas and practices around health, disease and healing – benefited from and supported the Roman imperial enterprise. The integration of imperial territory by the second century CE established a unified (but not uniform) medical culture but also helped the spread of disease, culminating in the Antonine Plague.

This book explores relations between medicine and empire in the Roman world. It charts Rome's accumulation of medical resources in the Republic, bound up with the acquisition of territory and power, and then reveals the redistribution of those resources as part of the larger project of imperial consolidation after Augustus. It demonstrates the ways in which medicine – ideas and practices around health, disease and healing – supported the Roman imperial enterprise. From the medical care of large enslaved workforces and Roman armies to the hierarchies of medical practitioners in communities across the empire and the ordering of health and bodies. Rome was the medical and political capital of the Mediterranean. It was also the disease capital, and the integration of imperial territory by the second century CE not only established a unified (but not uniform) medical culture but also helped the spread of disease, culminating in the Antonine Plague.