The medical meeting place

This paper looks at a variety of relatively unfamiliar texts in which doctors are reported as acting together, in worship, in medical groups, in practice, and in teaching. It concludes that there may have been far more healers than has been often supposed, who learned their medicine in a variety of ways. Their social status depended to a large extent on the community in which they practised, but, for the most part, doctors associated, or were presumed to associate, with craftsmen of moderate wealth and were rarely part of the local elite.