In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle opens a delightful cabinet of surprising facts from the healing arts of Greece and Rome
‘A doctor should not quote poetry in support of his opinions, for such earnest zeal suggests incompetence.’ This quotation from Hippocrates, the father of medicine, is one of the epigraphs to J. C. McKeown’s eye-opening (and occasionally eye-watering) A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome
McKeown’s book is divided into fourteen chapters on a variety of themes, including ‘the doctor in society’, ‘attitudes to doctors’, ‘sex matters’, ‘women and children’, ‘preventive medicine’, and, of course, ‘treatment and cures’ (which gets two chapters). Within each chapter, McKeown has assembled an impressive range of sources from the classical world, such as Galen and Aristotle, but also less familiar figures including Apollodorus, Soranus, and the wonderfully named Cassius Iatrosophista, a Greek medical writer from nearly 2,000 years ago who is known as the author of Quaestiones Medicae et Problemata Naturalia.
Pliny the Elder, as one might expect, features heavily for his prolific advice on all manner of medical conditions. According to his Natural History, menstrual blood turns new wine sour, makes grain fields sterile, dries up seeds,
Meanwhile, in the ‘sex matters’ chapter, we learn from Aëtius that ‘the testicles of castrated mules, roasted and then mixed with the juice of the willow tree boiled in water, act as a contraceptive’ while Paul of Aegina advises those who have no enthusiasm for sex to ‘burn a gecko and grind the ashes to a fine powder, pour on some olive oil, smear the big toe of your right foot with the mixture, and then have intercourse.’ Hippocrates, of the famous oath, tells us that ‘uninhibited fornication cures dysentery’.
If you’re constipated, meanwhile, then in the ‘treatment and cures’ chapters we are informed (by Caelius Aurelianus) that ‘swallowing a lead pill is beneficial to many people’, for ‘by its weight it pushes against and thrusts out whatever is causing the obstruction’. Even more remarkable is Dioscorides’s extensive (and worryingly specific) list of afflictions which the various types of dung can be used to treat: cow dung, for instance, can cure sciatica, a prolapsed uterus, and bone inflammation; goat dung is good for jaundice, baldness, gout, and snakebite; donkey and horse dung is recommended for scorpion stings and general bleeding; and dog muck is good for tonsillitis (as is human ordure, apparently: quite where the dung is meant to be applied, one can only guess, and shudder). Crocodile dung was used in cosmetics for women’s faces, which brings a whole new meaning to the idiom ‘to get sh*tfaced’.
A Cabinet of Ancient Medical Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Healing Arts of Greece and Rome
Oliver Tearle is a lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History