”, and that “‘[a]ntiquity offers no evidence of any provision for the care of the crippled’” (p. 69), citing secondary sources. Yet the second quotation, taken from an 1956 article, is certainly incorrect (see, for instance, M L Rose's book The staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in Ancient Greece, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003). Likewise, the first statement hardly applies to all the variegated societies and individuals within the classical Graeco-Roman world. Furthermore, like Miller quoted above, Crislip interprets his primary sources in a tendentious manner. For example, the evidence for the presence of physicians in St Basil's hospital largely hinges on half a sentence in one of St Basil's letters where he talks about “iatreuontes”, translated by Crislip as “physicians” and “doctors”, although it can simply mean “those who treat”. In the face of such sparse evidence, he resorts to arguments like the following (p. 116): “There is no contemporary evidence for the architecture of the hospital [founded by St Basil], nor is there any description of the types of medical procedures employed. Nevertheless, since Basil himself as a young man was trained in standard Hippocratic and Galenic medicine we may suppose that a similar standard was employed in his hospital.”
Apart from these generalizations and interpretative liberties, Crislip's approach also lacks theoretical rigour. Following Miller, Crislip attaches great importance to the distinction between “hospices” and “hospitals”, the latter being characterized by the presence of professional physicians. Whether this distinction between caring and curing or the quest for the first hospital thus defined are useful has rightly been questioned by scholars such as Peregrine Horden and Vivian Nutton (none of whose contributions published during the last two decades is cited). Finally, out of a desire to find the present in the past, as it would appear, Crislip frequently employs modern terminology such as the term “triage officer”. The “triage” in the monasteries of Egypt has, however, little to do with that occurring in modern hospitals. In the former, an elder who often was not a physician himself would determine whether the patient was really sick or merely pretending to be so in order to gain remission from the harsh duties and access to better food (and maybe even some wine); he would then decide whether the disease was caused by a demon, therefore requiring exorcism, or by natural causes.
Despite these criticisms, Crislip's book contains some interesting material, for instance, when he quotes from hitherto unpublished Coptic sources. And, like that by Timothy S Miller, it will undoubtedly provoke fruitful scholarly debate.