Transforming Bodies, Transforming Bioethics: The Early Middle Ages and the Early Islamic World, c. 500–1000 CE

We relate perceptions of the body during this period of transformation (500–1000 CE) to medical and philosophical thought. Using the concept of a body-world as represented in everyday life, philosophy, the arts, religion, and medicine, we describe the individual body as the lived experience of the body, the social body, shaped by the tensions between the demands of a social/moral order and the egocentric drives, and the body politic, an institutionalized and disciplined body. We describe the historical background, the merging of the Roman heritage with the so-called ‘barbarian’ world, bringing to the fore a new Medieval and Islamic culture, respectively. The gradually increasing loss of autonomous control over the individual body and the dissolution of Public Health, together with the growing influence of Christianity and Islam, contributed to the disappearance of the medical body as an autonomous category and to the understanding of the sick body as primarily being subject to God. We highlight the commonalities and the differences between the North and the South. Overall, the body was perceived through the strict rules of hegemonic dependencies, tradition, and religious submission, with the ‘Grace of God’ being the only hope for the diseased body. As Grace is not to be judged but can only be hoped for, bioethics and the Hippocratic Oath became largely redundant.