Saints Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs

Cosmas and Damian were, according to their Acts, twin brothers and physicians in Syria or Cilicia who treated the sick without taking any payment; the Greek Church calls them “unmercenaries”. The same Acts tell that under Diocletian they were arrested, tortured and beheaded, by one account at Aegeae in Cilicia, and that they were buried at Cyrrhus in Syria, where an early shrine stood. The East has several pairs of saints with these names, and the accounts vary. In Rome, in the 520s, Pope Felix IV dedicated to them a church in the Forum, with a mosaic of the two that still survives, and their names are in the Roman Canon of the Mass. Physicians and pharmacists took them as patrons.