Greek doctors and Roman patients: a medical anthropological approach.

Our view of the meeting of Greek doctors and Roman patients is not yet clear and not well-balanced in that its non-medical aspects have been over-emphasized. It is useful to look at current work of medical anthropologists and to see if we can define the problem itself more clearly by borrowing their analysis of health care systems. Furthermore, a medical anthropological approach, in which as much importance is attached to the more strictly medical issues as to external influences in assessing, for example, the effectiveness of patient-practitioner relationships, allows us to shift the focus of the discourse.