Heading backward in history - the last one was medieval England, this one is early Christian Italy - about 400 to 500 AD - excuse me, that should be CE. I guess some people are offended by Anno Domini, fortunately not offended enough to want to change the calendar to some baseline not associated with religion. I'm not sure what the kick-off point is for the Hebrew calendar --- well, now I have some idea from a quick scan of the Wiki. Apparently it dates from the Biblical beginning of the world - or a year or so before that. It seems that there is considerable debate among Talmudic scholars. Since the Christian calendar is off by several years one way or the other, I suppose the whole thing is academic anyway. I frequently tell math students that we do some things the way we do because that's the way that we do them. It works and everybody knows what everybody else is talking about - so just get used to it. One of the real math professors stopped by my office one day last term and asked me (me?) why we rationalize denominators - I told her it was so I would not have wasted so much time making my developmental students learn to do it that way. Apologies to non-math nerds.
But I digress, anybody surprised? This was a lot of fun. The main character, Getorius, is a physician and his wife, Arcadia, is training with him - she wants to open a women's clinic in Ravenna. Patients would come to him and describe their symptoms and you get to guess what the ailment actually is. He studies Galen obsessively and discusses everything in terms of "humors" and phlegm. I recognized diabetes, gout, kidney stones, and several others - not to mention the common cold, and the "there but for penicillin" injuries.
There is also a good bit of interesting background on the growing domination of the Roman Catholic church. I guess I had been rather conditioned to generally accept the RC discription of the early centuries of the church. There were a number of other Christian sects, as well as any number of pagan sects. In this period the Roman church was busily wiping out the competition.
The mystery is satisfyingly complex and comes to a most dramatic conclusion.
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