Public Health in the Hellenistic City-States

Villiam Bartholdy, University of Copenhagen

One of the central human rights is the ‘right to adequate health’. At the core of this is the access to medical care. The ancient world didn’t possess anywhere near the sani-tary and medical infrastructure that we do now, yet still, we can find evidence that measures were taken towards cleaner environments and healthier people, especially from the Hellenistic period onwards. These measures included having civic physicians who treated civilians in the city-states as well as building aqueducts and sewage to provide cleaner water. The aim of this paper is to uncover the extent of these measures. On the basis of this, I further hope to give an estimate to the intention be-hind these measures and to why they seem to become a valued provision by the state in the Hellenistic city-states. The paper will consist of three parts. In the first part I will survey the thoughts to-wards hygiene found in the epigraphical material, along with prose texts from Aristotle and Hippocrates, among others. In the second part I will attempt to map the materiali-zation of the ideas in city-planning and active civic physicians. In the third and last part I will combine the findings from the first two parts in a discussion of what the intention behind these initiatives could have been. The discussion will find its basis in two oppos-ing notions of population development: On the one hand that the focus on public health is a result of a general interest in growth in the ancient Greek societies and on the other hand that it was in place to avoid the population dwindling. The aim is to show which direction the sources point towards if any.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 52. Public Health and Environmental Planning