Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

by Helen Rhee

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2022

Overview

What did pain and illness mean to early Christians? And how did their approaches to health care compare to those of the ancient Greco-Roman world?

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study, Helen Rhee examines the ways early Christians viewed illness, pain, and health care—and how they were influenced both by their own tradition and by the milieu of the larger ancient world. Throughout the book, Rhee places the history of medicine, Greco-Roman literature, and ancient philosophy in fruitful dialogue with early Christian literature and theology to show the nuanced ways Christians understood, appropriated, and reformulated Roman and Byzantine conceptions of health and wholeness from the second through the sixth centuries CE.

Utilizing the contemporary field of medical anthropology, Rhee engages illness, pain, and health care as sociocultural matters. Through this and other methodologies, she explores the theological meanings attributed to illness and pain; the religious status of those suffering from these and other afflictions; and the methods, systems, and rituals that Christian individuals, churches, and monasteries devised to care for those who suffered. Rhee’s findings ultimately provide an illuminating glimpse into an instrumental way that Christians began shaping a distinct identity—both as part of and apart from their Greco-Roman world.

Key Features

• Adresses illness, pain, and health care as sociocultural matters
• Explores the theological meanings attributed to illness and pain
• Provides an illuminating glimpse into an instrumental way that Christians began shaping a distinct identity

Contents

• Concepts of Health, Disease, and Illness in Greco-Roman Literature, Medicine, and Philosophy
• Concepts of Health, Disease, and Illness in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and Early Christianity
• Pain—Experience, Narrative, and Identity Formation in Greco-Roman Culture and Early Christianity
• Health Care in the Greco-Roman World
• Health Care in Early Christianity

Product Details

• Title: Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity
• Author: Helen Rhee
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2022
• Pages: 351
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Medicine › Religious aspects--Christianity--History; Pain › Religious aspects--Christianity--History; Health › Religious aspects--Christianity--History; Church history › Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600
• ISBNs: 9780802876843, 0802876846
• Resource ID: LLS:LLNSSPNCHRSTNTY
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-10-14T18:52:21Z

About Helen Rhee

Helen Rhee is an associate professor of church history at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and served as a pastor for a number of years. She specializes in early Christian history, especially second- and third- century Christian literature, and is the author of Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries.