Old-Time Makers of Medicine — Ap. 1 St. Luke the Physician, part 1/2

ST.

LUKE THE PHYSICIAN[32]

In the midst of what has been called the "higher criticism" of the Bible in recent times, one of the long accepted traditions that has been most strenuously assailed and, indeed, in the minds of many scholars, seemed, for a time at least, quite discredited, was that St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, was a physician.

Distinguished authorities in early Christian apologetics have declared that the pillars of primitive Christian history are the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Luke, and the history of Eusebius.

It is quite easy to understand, then, that the attack upon the authenticity of the writings usually assigned to St. Luke, which in many minds seemed successful, has been considered of great importance.

In the very recent time there has been a decided reaction in this matter.

This has come, not so much from Roman Catholics, who have always clung to the traditional view, and whose great Biblical students have been foremost in the support of the previously accepted opinion, but from some of the most strenuous of the German higher critics, who now appreciate that destructive, so-called higher criticism went too far, and that the traditional view not only can be maintained, but is the only opinion that will adequately respond to all the new facts that have been found, and all the recently gathered information with regard to the relations of events in the olden time.

By far the most important contribution to the discussion in recent years came not long since from the pen of Professor Adolph Harnack, the professor of church history in the University of Berlin.

Professor Harnack's name is usually cited as that of one of the most destructive of the higher critics.

His recent book, however, "Luke the Physician,"[33] is an entire submission to the old-fashioned viewpoint that the writer of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was a Greek fellow-worker of St. Paul, who had been in company for years with Mark and Philip and James, and who had previously been a physician, and was evidently well versed in all the medical lore of that time.

Harnack does not merely concede the old position.

As might be expected, his rediscussion of the subject clinches the arguments for the traditional view, and makes it impossible ever to call it in question again.

It is easy to understand how important are such admissions when we recall how much this traditional view has been assailed, and how those who have held it have been accused of old-fogyism and lack of scholarship, and unwarranted clinging to antiquated notions just because they thought they were of faith, and how, lacking in true scholarship, seriously hampering genuine investigation, such conservatism has been declared to be.

The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack.

He began his excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an historian of early Christian medicine.

Some of his works on medical conditions just before and after Christ are quoted confidently by the distinguished German medical historians.

From this department he graduated into the field of the higher criticism.

He is eminently in a position, therefore, to state the case with regard to St. Luke fully, and to indicate absolutely the conclusions that should be drawn from the premises of fact, writings, and traditions that we have.

He does so in a very striking way.

Perhaps no better example of his thoroughly lucid and eminently logical mode of argumentation is to be found than the paragraph in which he states the question.

It might well be recommended as an example of terse forcefulness and logical sequence that deserves the emulation of all those who want to write on medical subjects.

If we had more of these characteristic qualities of Harnack's style, our medical literature, so called, would not need to occupy so many pages of print as it does--yet would say more.

Here it is: St. Luke, according to St. Paul, was a physician.

When a physician writes a historical work it does not necessarily follow that his profession shows itself in his writing; yet it is only natural for one to look for traces of the author's medical profession in such a work.

These traces may be of different kinds: 1, The whole character of the narrative may be determined by points of view, aims, and ideals which are more or less medical (disease and its treatment); 2, marked preference may be shown for stories concerning the healing of diseases, which stories may be given in great number and detail; 3, the language may be colored by the language of physicians (medical technical terms, metaphors of medical character, etc. ).

All these three groups of characteristic signs are found, as we shall see, in the historical work which bears the name of St. Luke.

Here, however, it may be objected that the subject matter itself is responsible for these traits, so that their evidence is not decisive for the medical calling of the author.

Jesus appeared as a great physician and healer.

All the evangelists say this of Him; hence it is not surprising that one of them has set this phase of His ministry in the foreground, and has regarded it as the most important.

Our evangelist need not therefore have been a physician, especially if he were a Greek, seeing that in those days Greeks with religious interests were disposed to regard religion mainly under the category of healing and salvation.

This is true, yet such a combination of characteristic signs will compel us to believe that the author was a physician if, 4, the description of the particular cases of disease shows distinct traces of medical diagnosis and scientific knowledge;

5, if the language, even where questions of medicine or of healing are not touched upon, is colored by medical phraseology; and, 6, if in those passages where the author speaks as an eye-witness medical traits are especially and prominently apparent.

These three kinds of tokens are also found in the historical work of our author.

It is accordingly proved that it proceeds from the pen of a physician.

The importance of the concession that Luke was a physician should be properly appreciated.

His whole gospel is written from that standpoint.

For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls.

He has more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists.

He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were eye-witnesses, and when they were told in naive and popular language that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retold the story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes clearer than ever.

In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians, Luke eliminates it.

In a number of cases the correction of Mark's popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek medical terminology of the times.

As a matter of fact, there seems to be no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a practising physician in Malta of considerable experience.

His testimony, then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical eye-witness.

In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge.

The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time.

It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum.

A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named, and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain appearances in the fourth ventricle.

His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laid the foundation for serious study there.

For three centuries there is some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is preserved for us in the history of medicine.

Other Greek schools of medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did excellent work.

Galen is the great representative of this school, and he came in the century after St. Luke.

A physician educated in Greek medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.

The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be interesting to all physicians.

Some of the distinctive passages in which Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech.

The use of the word _hydropikos_, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time, though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a typical example.

Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis, indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due to a stroke of apoplexy.

We who, as physicians, have heard of so many cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone to ask, as the first question, what sort of a paralysis it was.

Luke made inquiries from men who were eye-witnesses, and then has described the scene with such details as convinced him as a physician of the reality of the miracle, and his description was meant to carry conviction to the minds of others.

Occasionally St. Luke uses words which only a physician would be likely to know at all.

That is to say, even a man reasonably familiar with medical terminology and medical literature would not be likely to know them unless he had been technically trained.

One of these is the word _sphudron_, a word which is only medical, and is not to be found even in such large Greek lexicons of ordinary words as that of Passow.

Sphudron is the anatomical term of the Graeco-Alexandrian school for the condyles of the femur.

Galen and other medical authors use it, and Luke, in giving the details of the story of the lame man cured, in the third chapter of the Acts, seventh verse, selects it because it exactly expresses the meaning he wished to convey.

In this story there are a number of added medical details.

These are all evidently arranged so as to give the full medical significance to the miracle.

For instance, the man had been _lame from birth_, literally _from the womb of his mother_.

At this time he was forty years of age, an age at which the spontaneous cure of such an ailment or, indeed, any cure of it, could scarcely be expected, if, during the preceding time, there had been no improvement.

In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that his blindness fell from him like scales.

The figure is a typically medical one.

The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by Hobart ("Medical Language of St. Luke," Dublin, 1882), exactly the term that is used for the falling of scales from the body.

The term for scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall from the body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious fevers, as in scarlet fever.

Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many places.

It is distinctively a medical word.

In the story of the vision of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word _ecstasis_, from which we derive our word ecstasy, is used.

This is the only word St. Luke uses for vision and he alone uses it.

This term is of constant employment in a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before it.

When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular term.

This might mean anything or nothing for a physician.

Luke uses one of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.

In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer.

It is Luke's characteristic story and a typical medical instance.

He employs certain words in it that are used only by medical writers.

The use of oil and wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such cases but not wine.

More careful search of the old masters of medicine, however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but externally.

Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations of this combination for wounds.

It is rather interesting to realize this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic.

There seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were treated in other ways.

The wine would cleanse and at least inhibit bacterial growth.

The subsequent covering with oil would serve to protect the wound to some degree from external contamination.

Sometimes there is an application of medical terms to something extraneous from medicine that makes the phrase employed quite amusing.

For instance, when Luke wants to explain how they strengthened the vessel in which they were to sail he describes the process by the term which was used in medical Greek to mean the splinting of a part or at least the binding of it up in such a way as to enable it to be used.

The word was quite a puzzle to the commentators until it was pointed out that it was the familiar medical term, and then it was easy to understand.

Occasionally this use of a medical term gives a strikingly accurate significance to Luke's diction.

For instance, where other evangelists talk of the Lord looking at a patient or turning to them, Luke uses the expression that was technically employed for a physician's examination of his patient, as if the Lord carefully looked over the ailing people to see their physical needs, and then proceeded to cure them.

Manifestly in Luke's mind the most interesting phase of the Lord's life was His exhibition of curative powers, and the Saviour was for him the divine healer, the God physician of bodies as well as of souls.

There are many little incidents which he relates that emphasize this.

For instance, where St. Mark talks about the healing of the man with a withered hand, St. Luke adds the characteristic medical note that it was the right hand.

When he tells of the cutting off of the ear of the servant of the high priest in the Garden of Olives St. Luke takes the story from St. Mark, but adds the information that would appeal to a physician that it was the right ear.

Moreover, though all four evangelists record the cutting off of the ear, only St. Luke adds the information that the Lord healed it again.

It is as if he were defending the kindly feelings of the Divine Physician and as if it would have been inexcusable had He not exerted His miraculous powers of healing on this occasion.

It is St. Luke, too, who has constantly distinguished between natural illnesses and cases of possession.

This careful distinction alone would point to the author of the third gospel and the Acts as surely a physician.

As it is it confirms beyond all doubt the claim that the writer of these portions of the New Testament was a physician thoroughly familiar with all the medical writings of the time and probably a physician who had practised for a long time.

Certain miracles of healing are related only by St. Luke as if he realized better than any of the other evangelists the evidential value that such instances would have for future generations as to the divinity of the personage who worked them.

The beautiful story of the raising from death of the son of the widow of Nain is probably one of the oftenest quoted passages from St. Luke.

It is a charming bit of literature.

While it suggests the writer physician it makes one almost sure that the other tradition according to which St. Luke was also a painter must be true.

The scene is as picturesque as it can be.

The Lord and His Apostles and the multitudes coming to the gate of the little city just as in the evening sun the funeral cortege with the widow burying her only son came out of it.

The approach of the Lord to the weeping mother, His command to the dead son to arise, and the simple words, "and he gave him back to his mother," constitute as charming a scene as a painter ever tried to visualize.

Besides this, Luke alone has the story of the man suffering with dropsy and the woman suffering from weakness.

The intensely picturesque quality of many of these scenes that he describes so vividly would indeed seem to place beyond all doubt the old tradition that he was an artist as well as a physician.

It is interesting to realize that it is to Luke alone that we owe the account of the well-known message sent by Christ Himself to John the Baptist when John sent his disciples to inquire as to His mission.

After describing His ministry He said: "Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are made clean, the dead rise again, to the poor the Gospel is preached."

To no one more than to a physician would that description of His mission appeal as surely divine.

To those who care to follow the subject still further, and above all, to read opinions given before the reversal of the verdict of the higher criticism on the Lucan writings, indeed before ever that trial was brought, there is much in "Horae Lucanae--A Biography of St. Luke," by Henry Samuel Baynes (Longmans, 1870), that will surely be of interest.

He has some interesting quotations which show how thoroughly previous centuries realized all the force of modern arguments.

For instance, the following paragraph from Dr. Nathaniel Robinson, a Scotch physician of the eighteenth century, will illustrate this.

Dr. Robinson said: It is manifest from his Gospel, that Luke was both an acute observer, and had even given professional attention to all our Saviour's miracles of healing.

Originally, among the Egyptians, divinity and physic were united in the same order of men, so that the priest had the care of souls, and was also the physician.

It was much the same under the Jewish economy.

But after physic came to be studied by the Greeks, they separated the two professions.

That a physician should write the history of our Saviour's life was appropriate, as there were divers mysterious things to be noticed, concerning which his education enabled him to form a becoming judgment.

It is even interesting to realize that St. Luke's tendency to use medical terms has been of definite value in determining the question whether both the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are by the same man.

They have been attributed to St. Luke traditionally, but in the higher criticism some doubt has been thrown on this and an elaborate hypothesis of dual authorship set up.

It has been asserted that it is very improbable on extrinsic grounds that they were both written by one hand and certain intrinsic evidence, changes in the mode of narration, especially the use of the first personal pronoun in the plural in certain passages, has been pointed to as making against single authorship.

This tendency to deny old-time traditions of authorship with regard to many classical writings was a marked characteristic of the early part of the nineteenth century, but the close of the century saw practically all of these denials discredited.

The nineteenth century ushered in studies of Homer, with the separatist school perfectly confident in their assertion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by the same person, and even that the Iliad itself was the work of several hands.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously accepted ideas would create.

This is a determining factor in many a supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount sufficiently.

A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves.

The simple argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring their opinion into disrepute.

It is much easier to explain certain discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet.

Most of the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century.

The Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of one.

The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the same sort of criticism.

In every case, scholars have gone back to the older traditional view of a single author.

The phases of literary and historic criticism with regard to Luke's writings are, then, only a repetition of what all our great national classics have gone through from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.