Rufus of Ephesus and the Patient's Perspective in Medicine

Rufus of Ephesus's treatise Quaestiones Medicinales (QM; C1 AD) is unique in the known corpus of ancient medical writing. It has been taken for a procedural handbook serving an essentially operational purpose. But with its insistent message that doctors cannot properly understand and treat illnesses unless they supplement their own knowledge by questioning patients, and its distinct appreciation of the singularity of each patient's experience, Rufus's work shows itself to be no mere handbook but a treatise about the place of questioning in the clinical encounter. This paper concentrates on two aspects of Rufus's thought that are unusual by comparison with other ancient medical texts: his distinctively person-centred rather than disease-based concept of questioning, and his extension of 'habits' beyond the dietary and occupational to include an indeterminate range of individual characteristics whose relevance to illness is not immediately obvious. In his quest for subjective information to set alongside observable facts, Rufus appreciates that illness cannot be understood simply through objective physical data. His treatise, with its exhortatory tone and phenomenological undertones, shows that he gave careful consideration to how the patient's perspective can help build medical knowledge, giving QM a greater philosophical significance than has previously been appreciated.