Healthcare in Early Christianity

I’ve just finished reading several chapters from a very interesting book by Gary B. Ferngren on Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore: University of John Hopkins Press, 2009). He contends that Christians really pioneered organized community healthcare, both for the church and for those external to it:

From the very beginning Christianity displayed a marked philanthropic imperative that manifested itself in both personal and corporate concern for those in physical need. In contrast to the classical world, which had no religious impulse for charity that took the form of personal concern for those in distress, Christianity regarded charity  as motivated by agape, a self-giving love of one’s fellow human beings reflected in the incarnational and redemptive love of God in Jesus Christ … Owning to a combination of inner motivation, self-discipline, and effective leadership, the local congregation created in the first two centuries of its existence an organization, unique in the classical world, that effectively and systeamtically cared for the sick.

Now there were cultic ritual and temples, like Asclepius and Serapis, where one could go for healing, and burial clubs too. However, adds Rodney Stark, “pagan cults were not able to get people to do much of anything … And at the bottom of this weakness is the inability of non-exclusive faiths to generate belonging.”

Much of the momentum for Christian ministries towards the sick and dying emerged during the mid-third century amidst the North Africa plague under the Bishopric of Cyrpian of Carthage. The medical corps of the church were called the parabalanoi and and spoudaioi with specific roles in caring for the ill.

According to Ferngren, Christians created what had been termed ‘a miniature welfare state in an empire which for the most part lacked social services.” He adds: “Though it was originally directed almost exclusively to the Christian community, the church’s program of caring for the sick reached out in times of plague to pagan neighbors and was highly effective in making converts .. The church provided the essential of social security: it cared for widows and orphans, the old, the unemployed, and the disabled; it provided a burial fund for the poor and nursing service in time of plague … the philanthropic motives of the church was essential to its success, and the church never lost sight of its program of caring for the indigent who suffered physical affliction. Indeed, in its development and extension of that role lies Christianity’s chief contribution to health care.”