“Elite medicine in Alexandria and subsequently was a deliberate expression of Greek identity, recognized and reinforced by royal patronage, not through racial markers or even solely linguistic ones, but through an exclusive performance of paideia [education or upbringing] that differentiated the uninitiated or uncooperative from a shared assertion of cultural authority. This added another barrier between the medicine of the elite, confirmed by their access to and employment at court, and practitioners of other kinds of healing or lesser status.

“The medicine of the elite physicians of Alexandria existed firmly within a particular politico-cultural context: the Ptolemaic project to make Alexandria the capital of the Greek cultural world. It was outside the court, the Library, the Museion, and other such identity claims, that boundaries between practitioners and practices were less distinct, and where adaptation to changing cultural conditions and the necessity of functioning in more than one socio-cultural environment encouraged more eclectic forms of knowledge.

“Thus Alexandria encapsulates the plurality of engagement at its most manifold and commonplace, as Jewish, Egyptian and Greek forms of medical practice, and related systems of knowledge, interacted through competition, trade and adaptation. The city’s most famous institutions, however, represent Greek cultural exclusivity at its most extreme: the attempt to define knowledge and its canon through an excluding framework of heuristics, demonstration and textual control.”