College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Antique medicine

An excavation in Israel has yielded Hector Avalos a hands-on opportunity to continue his research into ancient health care systems.

It was shear luck that Hector Avalos, associate professor of religious studies, walked onto an archaeological site in the town of Bethsaida, Israel.

Avalos was in Israel last summer to lecture on ancient health care systems when he was touring Bethsaida, a town mentioned in the Bible as the hometown of several disciples of Jesus. Since 1997, excavations have uncovered an Iron Age settlement underneath the famed city.

"I was walking through the site and I happened upon the leader of the excavations," Avalos recalled. "In our conversation, he mentioned that they had just recently discovered some ancient medical instruments.

"I was stunned by my luck," he continued. "Here I have written on ancient health care systems for over ten years and I literally walk on this site by accident just days after my arrival in the country."

A recognized expert in ancient health care systems, Avalos has been asked by the excavation leader (Rami Arav, professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha) to study the instruments to determine their use as well as looking at the site where the instruments were found.

Avalos says that the excavation where the instruments were located could be either a physician's home or a clinic of some sort. He says this is one of the few discoveries of such a "clinic" and subsequent instruments in Israel during the Greco-Roman period.

"You don't find medical instruments over there with any regularity," he said. "This is an unusual find."

This is also the first time that Avalos has run across such medical instruments at an archaeological site.

"The instruments themselves are in relatively good condition and we can attempt a good guess of what they were used for," he said.

As a result of Avalos' efforts, Iowa State will join a consortium of universities that are studying Bethsaida. The Jewish Studies Committee provided funding for membership in this consortium for 2001. Avalos will serve as on the consoritum's board of directors.

"As a member of the consortium, we can have access to study all the materials taken from the site including coins, bones, pottery and a variety of cultic objects," he said.

Iowa State faculty and students are eligible to work the site and Avalos hopes to develop a course in Biblical archaeology in the future.

"This is a wonderful opportunity," he said, "but it will also help our students and potentially enhance the curriculum as well."

Avalos has written two books on ancient health care. His latest, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity, argues that Christianity arose as a Jewish sect that was responding in part, to problems of health care within Judaism and the Greco-Roman world.

"What I've been working to do is to initiate an entirely new area of study," Avalos said. "I look at medical anthropology with history and Biblical studies that have not been done before."