Luke the Physician

Interesting reading can be found in the excerpts that follow.  The whole article comes from http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/medicine-20.shtml.  Note – the piece contains many uncorrected typographical errors
which the reader will need to navigate around.  Electronic scanning programs are not yet completely reliable.

St. Luke The Physician (Originally Published 1911)

 “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.

“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," 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.

[Prof. Harnack writes:]

“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.

“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 fir4 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 cutticulum. 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 appearanees in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laryd 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 lie 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 frryends, 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.”