The physician's apprentice

In Hellenistic Greece the only profession that had any structured education was that of the physician. Preparation for everything was based on apprenticeships. So, student lawyers and engineers and architects would basically shadow those practising these professions. No degrees, no years spent learning the theory separately from the practice.

Since it's the most structured, however, Marrou follows the path of the physician, noting how a student of the time would slowly climb the medical ranks within a doctor's practice until he took over that practice. Marrou also notes that doctors of the Hellenistic period may have lacked our technical anatomical know how, but they had quite the bedside manner. There are whole contemporary manuals about the psychology of the doctor/patient interaction, actually.

Perhaps this concentration on the psychological side of doctoring comes from the old notion that the body is sacred and shouldn't be internally inspected. Such a belief would be sure to get people more interested in getting into each others' heads (the work of language) than into each others' inner physiological workings (the work of science).