Accusations that rival group doctors poison patients date back to antiquity and cross cultures

Evidence

According to the first-century CE Roman philosopher and naturalist Pliny the Elder, the Roman statesman and moralist Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE), a fierce adversary of the Hellenisation of Roman culture, accused Greek physicians of having ‘conspired among themselves to murder all barbarians [i.e. non-Greeks] with their medicine’. Likewise, in Islamic Spain, the twelfth-century jurist Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn ‘Abdun expressed the view that Muslims should not consent to be treated by either Jews or Christians since these subject dhimmis (‘protected peoples’ living under Islamic rule) must be assumed to be hostile to Muslims, and any Muslim treated by Jewish or Christian doctors consequently risked his or her life. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panic literature in the reader’s knowledge base — accusing internal/foreign groups of secret lethal malice is the classic panic template across centuries.
• SEED: Essay angle: the physician-as-assassin trope as one of history’s most durable conspiracy theories, from Cato to modern vaccination fears.