Disability, Medicine, and Healing Discourse in Early Christianity

Susan R. Holman is John R. Eckrich Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts at Valparaiso University. Her publications include eight academic monographs, among them Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights (Oxford 2015), recipient of the 2016 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Chris L. de Wet is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. His books include Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (2015) and The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (2018). Jonathan L. Zecher is Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and Co-Director of ReMeDHe, an international working group for Religion, Medicine, Disability, and Health in Late Antiquity. His second book, Spiritual Direction as a Medical Art in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford), was published in 2022.

1. Introduction: Discourses of Health between Late Antiquity and Postmodernity; Part One: Marking Bodies, Making Communities; 2. Christ the Physician and his Deaf Followers: Medical Metaphors in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch - Anna Rebecca Sølevag; 3. A Circumcising Mission to the Gentiles and Hazing Culture – Adam Booth; 4. Pain in Ancient Medicine and Literature, and Early Christianity: A Paradox of Insharability and Agency – Helen Rhee; Part Two: Defining Patients, Delimiting Communities; 5. To Be, or Not to Be Sterile: that is a Question of Well-being in Byzantine Medical Discourse of the Sixth Century AD - Elisa Groff; 6. The Negotiation of Meaning in Late Antique Clinical Practice: Alexander of Tralles and "Natural Remedies" – Jonathan L. Zecher; 7. Medical Discourse, Identity Formation, and Otherness in Early Eastern Christianity – Chris L. de Wet; Part Three: Performing Health, Preserving Communities; 8. Hagiography and "Mental Health" in Late Antique Monasticism – Paul Dilley; 9. Shaping Water: Public Health and the ‘Medicine of Mortality’ in Late Antiquity – Susan R. Holman; Reflections; 10. Intersecting Christian Antiquity and Modern Health Care - Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen.