with advice on diet and activity and sometimes with more
drastic remedies such as purgative drugs or bloodletting, all
with the aim of rebalancing the humors. Th ey also practiced
traumatic surgery and cauterization of wounds. Diet and
exercise (together known as regimen) were also widely pre-
scribed as preventive measures.
Anatomy in the Hippocratic corpus is very speculative
and oft en inaccurate. Aristotle carried out animal dissec-
tions in the fourth century b.c.e. In Alexandria during the
third century the physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus
performed human dissection and even, according to a later
but almost certainly reliable report, human vivisection, or
operation on living beings. Th is greatly improved anatomi-
cal knowledge, including discovery of the heart valves, the
ovaries and Fallopian tubes, the structure of the eye, the
diff erence between motor and sensory nerves, and many
other fi ndings. But physicians still disagreed widely on how
to interpret their fi ndings. Herophilus seems to have held a
largely traditional theory of humoral imbalance. Erasistratus
developed a radical new theory, infl uenced by contemporary
developments in mechanics, of the heart as a pump and the
mechanical movement of fl uids around the body according to
pressure and vacuum. He argued that the arteries contained
only air, while veins contained only blood.
Possibly because even systematic investigation of human
anatomy had produced neither agreement on theory nor im-
provements in clinical treatment, some doctors rejected theory
altogether as useless. Th ey called themselves empiricists and
said that doctors should merely remember that certain reme-
dies had in the past been associated with recovery from certain
symptoms, without speculating about causes and eff ects.
Medicine consisted of a specialized and practical exper-
tise carried out by professionals, usually for a fee. As such,
some philosophers criticized it as being limited in scope and
a s hav i ng less i ntel lec t ua l st at us t ha n ph i losophy. I n response,
some physicians claimed that medicine was an exemplary
form of knowledge and very diffi cult to master. Other doc-
tors argued that medicine should not be too theoretical but
should be based on practical experience and paying attention
to the individual case.
Some contemporary dramas and epitaphs for the dead
attacked doctors as incompetent. Certainly their rate of suc-
cess was not high, though probably not noticeably worse than
other kinds of healers. Th e Hippocratic text Epidemics seems
to imply that physicians treated all social classes, including
the very poor, but it is diffi cult to assess whether doctors were
called in for routine illness or only when the situation became
obviously serious.
Medicine, in the sense of a naturalistic or scientifi c medi-
cine exclusive of other forms of healing such as religion or
magic, had several roles in society. First, as a practical sys-
tem of knowledge like that of a craft , it was widely used but
perhaps little trusted. Second, as an intellectual enterprise,
it tried to investigate and understand the human being as a
biological animal, using methods of observation, dissection,and occasionally experiment and reasoning from the data
thus produced. Th is role was strongly associated with liter-
acy, high social status, and natural philosophy, and there was
some confl ict between philosophy and medicine over their
relative intellectual merits.ROME
BY PHILIPPA LANG
Th e word science is derived from the Latin verb scio, which
means “to know” and in particular “to know by fi nding out,”
though it is not simply equivalent to what we mean by science
today. We can roughly defi ne science in ancient Roman as
any investigation or understanding of the material and natu-
ral world that proceeds by carefully reasoned argument on
the basis of empirical data and assumes that the world will
be consistent and ordered. If a stone always rises for a little
way and then falls back to earth, the presumption of natural
philosophy, or science, is that the stone will always behave in
the same way and for the same reasons and that we can work
out why it does so.
Science in Roman society and culture was derived to a
large extent from science and philosophy in Greek culture.
Many of the Roman aristocratic elite during the late Repub-
lic (second to fi rst centuries b.c.e.) and then in the Roman
Empire of the following centuries translated and discussed
Greek philosophy and science, while many Greeks in the Ro-
man Empire also continued to investigate and argue about
the way in which things worked. In fact, many leading fi g-
ures in the fi elds of science during the Roman Empire were of
Greek descent and culture, but they resided in places under
Roman control and worked for Roman emperors.
Th ese kinds of investigations were strongly associated
with the upper classes, who had the education, time, and in-
clination to pursue scientifi c and philosophical knowledge
either for its own sake or as part of a general understanding
of the world. At this time the major Greek philosophies of the
Hellenistic Period (323–31 b.c.e.) each off ered a comprehen-
sive understanding of the world and humankind’s place in it,
though none of them agreed with each other. Many Roman
aristocrats and intellectuals aligned themselves with one of
these philosophies and contributed to them, and their ethics
and theology were interdependent with their natural philos-
ophy—their theories of biology, physiology, psychology, and
what we would call physics and chemistry.
At the same time, areas of science with important tech-
nological and practical applications were used by both Roman
individuals and the Roman government. Th ese included civil,
personal, and military engineering and surveying, from archi-
tec t u re to ba l l i st ic s. Med ic i ne wa s a l so ver y i mpor t a nt. Roma n
and Italian culture incorporated a large amount of traditional
medicine in which foods and plants were administered for ill-
ness, oft en accompanied by incantations, magical rituals, and
appeals to the gods and other supernatural powers. Contacts
with Greek culture, however, introduced the professional phy-science: Rome 9410895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i941 941 10/10/07 2:30:30 PM