Roman natural history and science, and Roman medicine / by J. F. Payne.

  • Joseph Frank Payne
Date:
1910
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Roman natural history and science, and Roman medicine / by J. F. Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    female and some male divinities. It has been reckoned that at least twenty gods and goddesses might exercise their powers at one child-birth*. I075- A remarkable feature of Roman religious medicine was the recog- nition of special divinities as the authors of diseases. Cicero (De Nat. Deorum, iii 63) remarks on the impropriety of paying religious rites to the injurious powers of nature, Febris, Tempestates, Mala Fortuna. The goddess Febris must have had a special importance in a place so ravaged by fevers as Rome and its vicinity. We hear also of a Dta Mtfitis (for malaria), Dea Angtrona (for angina, or inflammation of the throat); and even, it is said, Dea Scabies (for the itch). (In some parts of India a special goddess of small-pox is still recognised and worshipped.) 1076. The empirical domestic medicine of early Rome is known chiefly from Pliny’s Natural History and from some fragments of Cato. Cato, with his well-known hostility to Greek learning, preferred the traditions of his forefathers and his own personal experience. He wrote a Commentariunt, extant in Pliny’s time though now lost, for the instruction of his son, whom he forbade to consult Greek physicians. There are a few medical precepts in his treatise De agri cultura. His therapeutic methods consisted chiefly in the use of simples, mostly herbs, with some rough surgery of wounds and injuries. Cabbage was a remedy for almost every ailment, a prescrip- tion quoted with approval by Pliny (xix 136; xx 78). Charms and incantations were also used. So, in treating a dislocation, splints made of reeds were to be applied, and at the same time certain unintelligible words were to be sung (Cato, c. 16a). Pliny, though sceptical as to the value of incantations, does not omit to mention some of them (xxviii 10—21). This magical element (which the classical Greek medicine, alone of all the ancient medical systems, repudiated) formed an important part of Roman popular medicine, as it has done among other peoples, and in later ages, even to the present day. It reappears in Marcelltis Empiricus (c. 400 a.d.), along with other medical folk-lore. We must not suppose, therefore, that, when Greek medicine was introduced into Rome, the old system was extinguished. Doubtless it remained the medical creed of the great mass of the people, among whom Greek ideas hardly penetrated. The cardinal dates in the history of Greek medicine at Rome are the introduction of the worship of Asklepios (293 b.c.) ; and the arrival of the Greek physicians, Archagathus (219 b.c.), Asclepiades (c. too b.c.), and Galen (163 a.d.). On the occasion of a severe pestilence at Rome, 293 b.c., the Sibylline books were consulted, and the advice thence worship of obtained was to apply for relief to the Greek divinity, (Aesculapius). Asklepios, at his temple in Epidaurus. The Roman envoys who proceeded thither were directed by the Asclepiads, or priests of the temple, to found a similar temple at Rome, and were pre- sented with a sacred serpent, which should confer sanctity on the new 1 Ivan Bloch, in Neuburger and Pagel’s Geschichte der Medizin, 1901, i 404. Introduction of Greek medicine. 1077.
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