Martyrs Cosmas and Damian of Rome

Life and Ministry

According to the tradition recorded in the synaxaria, Cosmas and Damian were born at Rome and trained as physicians. They treated the sick without charging a fee, a practice that earned them the title of unmercenaries. The accounts relate that when they healed, they told their patients, in effect, that the cure came not by their own power but by the power of Christ, the true God; their charity and confession are said to have converted many.

The lives relate that the Roman authorities arrested the brothers for their Christian faith and their refusal to offer pagan sacrifice. By tradition, when they were brought before the emperor Carinus, they openly professed Christ; the emperor was afflicted in answer to their witness and afterward healed through their prayers when he promised to turn to the faith, and they were released.

Martyrdom

The tradition holds that the brothers met their death through the envy of an older physician who had once instructed them in medicine. Resentful of their fame and favor, he is said to have lured them into the mountains under the pretext of gathering medicinal herbs, and there killed them. Accounts of the manner of their death vary in detail: the common Orthodox tradition relates that he stoned them, and several accounts add that he disposed of their bodies in a river.

Veneration

The three pairs of unmercenary physicians named Cosmas and Damian were widely venerated from an early date, and churches dedicated to saints of these names were established by the fourth century at Jerusalem, in Egypt, and in Mesopotamia. In the sixth century the emperor Justinian I (527-565) adorned a church dedicated to them in Constantinople after attributing his recovery from illness to their intercession, and Pope Felix IV (526-530) rededicated a building in the Roman Forum as the Basilica of Santi Cosma e Damiano. In Orthodox iconography the unmercenaries are commonly depicted as laymen holding boxes or spoons of medicine.

In Eastern Orthodox usage, November 1 is observed as the collective Synaxis of the Unmercenary Physicians, while July 1 is kept specifically for the Roman pair.