Politics, the Brain, and Public Health in Late Antiquity
By Jessica Wright
The point of departure for this paper is the engagement of early Christian preachers with medical knowledge (Rouselle; Brown; Perkins; Shaw; Crislip). My protagonist is the Antiochene priest and later bishop John Chrysostom (347–407 CE), whose saturation in—and saturation of his orations with—medical discourse has only recently become the subject of focused investigation (Mayer).