Background

In 1919, archaeological excavations at Thamugadi (now Timgad) in North Africa brought to light a fragment of an inscription containing an invocation to Christus Medicus – ‘Christ the Physician’. A second fragment completing the inscription was found nearby in 1923. This unique epigraphic evidence dating to the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century CE confirms numerous references to this concept in Christian literature. Arbesmann indicates that it was popular in Roman North Africa since the time of Tertullian (second and third centuries CE), and occurs very frequently in St. Augustine's works, especially in his sermons as priest and later Bishop at Hippo Regius. But before the reason for this African Church Father's use of the concept (which gives us an interesting glimpse of his personality) can be discussed, his life and his interest in the medical sciences have to be reviewed against the background of the era. The focus of this chapter is however not only Augustine himself; references to medicine in his voluminous writings allow us a wide-angle view of the whole medical scene in Roman North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE.

Life

Augustine's childhood and his progress as a young man are well documented in what can, to some extent, be seen as his autobiography, the Confessions. Aurelius Augustinus was born in 354 in the small town of Thagaste (now Souk Ahras in Algeria) from middle-class parents. His father, Patricius, about whom he has very little to say, was a pagan, but his mother, Monica, who had a great influence on him, was a Christian. He had his first education in Thagaste, where he was, inter alia, taught Greek, but he himself states that he never properly mastered it. At age eleven he went to Madauros (now Mdaourouch) for further schooling; he hated his time in school there, but enjoyed Latin, and Cicero's Hortensius sparked his interest in philosophy. Cicero, however, did not tell him about God, and finding the Bible disappointing because of the unskilful Latin translations that could not compare with Cicero's grand style, Augustine turned to the Manichees because of their appeal to reason and their erudition in the ‘liberal arts’ (see below).