Sts. Cosmas and Damian

Who they were

Cosmas and Damian were twin brothers, physicians of Syrian Cilicia, remembered across the whole early Church by a single professional detail: they took no fees. The Greek Christians called them the anargyroi, the silverless ones, and the title became a category, medicine practised as mercy.

Martyred in the Diocletian era around 287, their veneration spread with remarkable speed: churches in Constantinople and Rome, where their basilica on the Forum stands today, their names in the Roman Canon, and a medieval legend famous enough to tell as legend, the miraculous transplant of a leg, depicted by half the painters of the Renaissance and cheerfully claimed by modern transplant surgery as its impossible founding image. Their feast sits at the start of the medical guilds' year, with the White Masses of Catholic physicians clustering around it and around St. Luke's three weeks later.

Why people turn to Sts. Cosmas and Damian

Doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, and medical students, and with St. Luke this site's medical shelf is complete. Anyone running or funding free care has the patrons of the whole idea.

How to ask their intercession

For your own doctor and pharmacist by name, and, in their spirit, for the people who can afford neither. A prayer before surgery asking their intercession alongside the surgical team is an old and living practice.