Along the marble streets, keep an eye out for a carved staff with a serpent wound around it — the sign of Asklepios, and the ancient equivalent of a medical school’s brass plate. Ephesus was not just rich and holy; it was one of the healing centres of the Roman east.
The building traditionally pointed out as the hospital — a modest multi-roomed structure in the city centre — is best understood as part of a larger truth: Ephesus maintained a medical community with a public role. Inscriptions record an annual competition of physicians, contested in categories like surgery, instruments and diagnosis. A city that ranks its doctors in public championships takes its healthcare seriously.
Rufus, and the profession
The city’s most famous medical son, Rufus of Ephesus, wrote around the end of the first century AD on anatomy, kidney disease, melancholy and — remarkably ahead of schedule — the importance of questioning the patient. His works travelled through Arabic medicine into the European tradition; a doctor in medieval Baghdad or Renaissance Padua knew the name of Ephesus partly because of him.
Physical evidence fills a case in the Ephesus Museum: scalpels, probes, forceps, cupping vessels and drug boxes in bronze — a kit a modern field medic would half-recognise. And the gladiator graveyard offers the strangest testimony: bones showing expertly set fractures and even survived skull surgery. Somebody paid the fighters’ medical bills, and the doctors earned them.
