Cosmas and Damian:

Patron Saints of Medicine and Pharmacy

Source: Bender GA, Thom RA, Great Moments in Pharmacy: A History of Pharmacy in Pictures (Detroit, Michigan. Northwood Institute Press, 1966), 45 (painting by Robert A. Thom). The text and paintings for the book were commissioned and published by Parke, Davis & Company.

Twinship of the professions medicine and pharmacy is nowhere more strikingly portrayed than in the record of the lives, work, art, history, and legend that has come down to us concerning Saints Cosmas and Damian.

Twin brothers of Arabian descent – and devout Christians – physician Cosmas and apothecary Damian practiced their mutually-beneficial professions as a team in the second-half of the third century A.D. They offered the solace of religion as well as the benefit of their medical and professional knowledge to the sick without a fee, who made pilgrimage to their home in the seaport of Aegeae (in the Roman province of Cilicia, and now modern day Çukurova, Turkey), in Asia Minor.

Having inherited considerable wealth, the twin brothers are reputed to have offered their services and drugs gratuitously to the steady growing numbers of sufferers who came to them from all parts of Asia Minor and adjacent areas. Many reports of seeming miraculous cures which they achieved have been recorded.

The kindly work of Cosmas and Damian came to a sudden end when, on February 24, 303 A.D., the Roman emperor Diocletian issued his edicts to eliminate Christianity from the Roman Empire. With the new law, Christians had only the choice: rejection of their faith or death. In the province of Cilicia, the roman prefect Lysias, a sworn enemy of the new religion was especially eager to follow the edict to the letter, and the twins Cosmas and Damian were among the first to be arrested, and then executed when they refused to renounce Christianity even after being tortured.

Likely, Pope Symmachus (d. 514) canonized Cosmas and Damian in the fifth century A.D. Pope Felix IV (526-530) consecrated a church for them in Rome where their relics were later interned.

More information is available at: https://cosmas-and-damian.org/saints.html (accessed January 1, 2025).