Helen RHEE. Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022. 351 pp. $49.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-8028-7684-3. Reviewed by Adam BOOTH, C.S.C., Stonehill College, North Easton, MA 02356.

In this book, Helen Rhee leads readers through a wide range of texts that illustrate “the ways that early Christians understood, adopted, appropriated and reframed Greco-Roman medicine and health care from the second century CE to the fifth” (1). The discussion of early Christianity is contextualized through thorough syntheses of an equally diverse array of “Pagan” texts (and a few non-Christian Jewish sources). In addition to this lively ecosystem of texts, Rhee employs an eclectic array of theorists and contemporary philosophers (including Arthur Kleinman, Judith Perkins, Elaine Scarry, and Kathy Tanner) to bring these texts into conversation with one another. The result is that Rhee does not merely present us with a staccato presentation of one text after another but develops her thesis that the diverse ways in which early Christians appropriate Greco-Roman medical traditions were central to the project of Christian self-definition. The book is organized into five chapters of varying lengths, together with an introduction (discussing methodology and previewing the material to come), a conclusion, and three indices (organized by author, subject, and ancient sources).

Rhee resists easy dichotomies in her book. For instance, when presenting the different approaches to healing present in the Greco-Roman tradition, she shows how both Hippocratic texts and Galen at times treated religious approaches more or less sympathetically, opposing a simplistic view that sets “rational medicine” and “religious healing” as siloed off from one another. Rhee demonstrates how many early Christian texts hold together views that modern scholars might be inclined to view as contradictory, for instance, that some could hold to a Galenic humoral theory to explain the “how” of disease while still assigning God as the ultimate “why” of disease (whether viewed as punishment or for moral training). She also documents the ways in which various early Christian authors chose genuinely different paths. For instance, some apologists borrow from Galen’s account of the excellence of the human body to extol the Creator, while the ascetic tradition (e.g., Life of Antony) shows Antony breaking all the Galenic rules of regimen and being restored to prelapsarian health through his askesis. While this latter text associates health with holiness, other authors (e.g., Basil) view sickness as a gymnasium for the soul. Rhee builds on her treatment of the bodily experiences of health and illness to also consider the pervasiveness of the medical metaphor in Christian texts (e.g., sin or heresy as sickness; liturgy as therapeutic process).

There were a few moments where I wished Rhee had further complicated her account, but I recognize the sacrifices that must be made in the interest of brevity. For instance, Rhee discusses how men often controlled women’s diseases (49). This was doubtless often true, but Rhee here renders invisible the agency of those women who did function as medical practitioners (on whom, see Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen [Oxford: OUP, 2001] 39–42). Similarly, she concludes that conception and pregnancy were seen as salubrious (35) but elides mention of the contrary position taken by Soranus. In terms of the Christian material, Rhee concludes that the frequent Hebrew Bible association of illness and disobedience is muted in the New Testament (93), though she never considers 1 Cor 11:30. These lacunae in no way detract from the numerous positive contributions this book makes.

I hope that Rhee’s book will encourage more scholars of early Christianity to think both about the attitudes to illness, pain, and healthcare in the texts they study and also to consider how acts of appropriation and reframing of artifacts and ideas from their broader cultural milieu played a role in their authors’ work of self-definition. Due to the limitations of space, many of the texts Rhee discusses are given somewhat brief treatment, and many prompts for future articles are contained in this book. I believe this book could also find a home in the classroom. It could even provide the structuring principle for a syllabus in which students work through a selection of the primary texts discussed, with Rhee’s book as guide.