Ancient Medicine

Abstract

The experience of injury, illness, and disease unites human beings across time and place. Life in the ancient world was perilous. Disease, childbirth, food shortage, and war rendered it both short and brutish. Ancient medicine, like its modern counterpart, seeks to treat ailments and remedy pain. Homer’s Iliad begins with the god Apollo, an agent of both destruction and healing, spreading plague among the ranks of the Greek army (1.8–52). The same work presents Machaon, a physician from a long line of physicians, attending to wounds and employing pharmaceuticals without direct recourse to divine intervention (11.520–550). Injuries, illness, and disease admit different ascribed causes and prescribed therapeutic responses. Ancient medicinal thought varies considerably across cultures. Thus, for example, the famous humoral system of body fluids affirmed in the Hippocratic Corpus and subsequent medical thought does not easily map, despite some similarities, onto Ayurvedic medicine in ancient India. Physicians competed in a complex marketplace of medical ideas and practices. They plied their trade with insufficient, often erroneous, information about the body and the functions of its parts. It is difficult to fairly assess the efficacy of many treatments. Current knowledge of ancient medicine comes from a variety of different sources. These include a papyrus on gynecology from ancient Egypt; Neolithic skulls with trepanation holes; surgical instruments from the ruins of Pompeii (e.g., bone drills, catheters, spatula, lancet, scissors, vaginal specula, and cautery iron); terracotta votives of anatomical parts in Greek temples; a tombstone of an unnamed female physician in Gallo-Roman France; and a recently discovered moral-philosophical work, De indolentia, in which Galen records the loss of irreplaceable pharmaceutical recipes and one-off medical instruments in the fire that ravaged Rome in 192 ce. Lines between the practice of medicine and traditional cult or religion are blurry at best. Despite the ascendency of “rational” medicine in classical Greece, “irrational” medicine continued to exist. The former did not push out the latter. The ancients did not have a health-care system in the modern sense. Ancient healers comprise a diverse group of practitioners that include, among others, root-cutters, midwives, diviners, and surgeons. The threat of anachronism in recounting ancient medicine is ever-present. In fact, the use of “doctor” or “physician” to describe ancient therapists is seen by some to be anachronistic, as is the use of “medicine.” Precious little remains of a patient’s perspective. Despite the obstacles, the study of ancient medicine offers an invaluable glimpse into the thought, culture, and experience of ancient peoples.