A website to help you study the Gospel of Luke,

`Greek doctors were already famous for their skills in the sixth century, and could command high salaries at the courts of Greek tyrants or the Persian king, or significantly as publicly paid city doctors; their scientific theory was drawn from the Ionian philosophers, their skills were acquired by apprenticeship, heredity and practice. In the fifth century more stable identifiable groups begin to emerge... The process can be followed in the so-called Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical treatises attributed to Hippocrates of Cos, contemporary of Socrates, and mostly belonging to the period 430 to 330 BC. These works reveal already an established body of empirical data on most aspects of medicine - anatomy, physiology, gynaecology, pathology, epidemiology, and surgery... There is a lot of emphasis on diet and regimen, not surprising in a science where pharmacology and surgery necessarily played a smaller role. Many of the early treatises show attempts by doctors to distinguish their profession from the activities of natural philosophers, sophists, and `irrational medicine' - magicians, sorcerers, and quacks...' - Boardman, Griffin and Murray, The Oxford History of the Classical World.

Luke's training would probably have been by apprenticeship of some kind, although there is also a possibility that he trained at one of the emerging medical schools, such as the famous academy dedicated to Aesclepius, the healing god, at Pergamum. The kind of Greek he writes testifies to the fact that his education had been thorough. It has even been suggested (on no evidence whatsoever) that he was on his way there when he met Christians at Antioch and became a convert (J C Pollock, The Apostle). At any rate, he clearly had enough of a medical education to be regarded by Paul as a `doctor', and most probably to help Paul regularly with his recurrent medical problems.

Luke's medical knowledge would have been based on the ideas of Hippocrates, and in particular the idea that disease was caused by an imbalance in the four `humours' in the body (blood, bile, plegm and black bile). Some of his views would have been fairly primitive (it wasn't until after Luke's death that Galen discovered that the muscles were controlled by the brain) but there was some sophisticated medicine around in the first century too. Soranus of Ephesus, for instance, was the expert of the day in female complaints and child care. He studied female anatomy with great accuracy and demonstrated how to care for the unborn foetus to make difficult childbirths easier.

Luke's attitude to medicine would have been based on the Hippocratic Oath, which saw medicine as a special body of knowledge to be carefully guarded:

`I will hand on precepts, lectures, and all other learning to my sons, to those of my master, and to those pupils duly apprenticed and sworn, and to none other...'