The study of ancient medicine has grown in popularity over since the early 1990s in a variety of fields, including ancient texts, epigraphy, osteology, and archaeology. Many of the studies have demonstrated that there were a diversity of medical practices and concepts throughout the Graeco-Roman world. In this chapter it is shown that the evidence for medical practices in the province of Britannia indicates there are likely to have been a combination of indigenous, Roman and, possibly, Gallic conceptions of the body and its care. Hence, through an examination of material culture, inscriptions, and some textual evidence from Vindolanda, it is argued that the term Romano-British medicine is more appropriate than Roman medicine as a means of noting the heterogeneity in healthcare found in the Roman Empire.
John Z. Wee (ed.), The Comparable Body: Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greco–Roman Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 418, €138.00, hardback, ISBN: 9789004356764.