The superb quality of medical knowledge found in Rome can be traced back to other civilizations from the surrounding regions, a majority stemming from Greek and Hellenistic style texts depicting specific methods of patient treatment and care. Consequently, the influx of foreign knowledge increased the value of incoming immigrants (whether immigrating voluntarily, or by becoming a prisoner of war captured by the powerful Roman legions) tremendously. During the periods of Julius Caesar and Augustus, these important figures were granted civil liberties, such as the right to form associations (forming the primitive stages of a formal medical practice), and the widely controversial freedom from civil liberties. Whereas most Roman citizens and officials…show more content… Methods deriving strictly from philosophical and anatomical studies, physicians of this class attended one of the various schools of medicine, most commonly the Methodic School, Empiric School, or the Dogmatic School, each having its individual approach to medicine. Members of the Methodic School were instructed to first identify the disease of the patient at hand, then instruct lower level assistants, or nurses, to carry out the prescribed treatment. Often graduates of the Methodic School gave the least amount of personal attention to the patient, whilst diagnosing the most amount of patients in one period of time. Students of the Empiric School solely relied on treatments that were confirmed by decades of previous physicians prior, and would never attempt a recently discovered procedure regardless of its success. In stark comparison to the Empiric methods, the Dogmatic School heavily focused on detecting which of the four humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm) of the patient was imbalanced, and worked based off repairing the levels of that humor. Notwithstanding the evidence philosopher-physicians proved to be the more effective of the two types of available doctors, most Roman citizens, or Plebeians, were restricted to the more accessible barber-surgeons. Requiring no previous education or training,
