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cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight I get to say great things like, ego sum rex Romanum et supra grammaticam. How was that? >> That's not bad. >> Not bad.

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Because tonight we have a professor of classics, Jim McKeown. He's been here for 25 years. He was trained at the University of Cambridge in England. I understand they still have cows on the backs there. We have 85 cows on campus. What can Cambridge do to match that?

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He spent 15 years at Cambridge before he came here to UW-Madison 25 years ago, as I mentioned. He's a professor of classics. That means he can speak ancient Greek and Latin. We're looking forward to some of the super-duper phrases that he has to share with us. But most important from my point of view, scientists still look largely to the ancient Greeks as the source of our first roots in empirical science. If you take a course in the philosophy or history of science I think you start with, oftentimes, the ancient Greeks. It's going to be very interesting to hear how medicine and superstition mixed with he ancient Greeks. Please join me in welcoming Professor McKeown to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

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>> Thanks very much, Tom. Good evening, everyone. First of all, I'd like to say what a pleasure it is for me to be here tonight. Although ancient medicine isn't my usual field of research, I've been reading a lot ancient medical texts for quite some time now, and it is marvelous to have this opportunity to give an airing to some of the material I find while I've been reading it. Over the past few years, I have been compiling a series of books that consist mainly of curious facts and opinions that I've found in ancient authors, things that you don't usually find when you read normal accounts, because somehow they don't fit the picture that we usually have of the Greeks and the Romans. At the minute, I am just finishing up a book devoted entirely to curious things that doctors and other people said about medicine in antiquity. Now I should say right now that I have no medical expertise whatsoever. I come from a long line of patients.

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I started collecting the material for this book years ago, when I first gave lectures on the Greek and Latin origins of medical terminology. It never took me very long to run out of hard facts about medicine, so I used to regale the students with curious wee stories that I found in the primary texts of the Greek and Latin authors. Tonight what I want to do is to treat you as guinea pigs, or indeed, lab rats just to test your reactions to some of this material I'll be presenting. It all look curious to me, but if I get no response I'll know it's not curious enough. It's quite possible that some of the things I find funny are accepted nowadays as being true.

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One last thing I should say about by way of preliminary remarks, the title for my talk is "Medicine and Superstition in Ancient Greece," but I hope no one will mind if I stretch that a wee bit. You know how this works. Months before when you agree to give the talk at looks as if a nice narrow topic will do and then it somehow spreads out. Anyway, nineteen hundred years ago, the great Roman rhetorician Quintillion wrote a manual on how to be an effective public speaker. He said that it's very important to get your audience on your side right from the start of a speech, it's what the Romans called captatio benevolentiae, so he suggested it was no bad thing to begin with a joke. Now, I'm not really all that good at being humorous, but luckily there's a joke book compiled in Greek some time, nobody really knows, around the fifth century AD, and that can help me out. Here's a joke about medicine. This is the joke. Here it comes,

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A man went to a doctor and said, "Doctor, I feel dizzy for half an hour when I wake up, and then I feel fine". "Wake up half an hour later" replied the doctor.

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That is joke number three. Let me give you joke number 177 as well. When the patient he was operating on cried out in great pain, the surgeon, who was very stupid, reached for a blunter scalpel.

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Now those jokes are excruciating--

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--but I think for now you recognize the type. It's fairly familiar. And it might even lead you to think that the Greeks were just like us. But, I need hardly point out that the world has changed ever so greatly in the last couple of millennia. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew only five of the planets and not many more of the elements, and they had no zero. Germs and blood circulation were barely thought of and technology was primitive, and indeed, sometimes actively discouraged. Platypuses and penguins, potatoes and tomatoes, as we say around here, platypuses and tomatoes, were all far beyond their horizons. Whereas they thought that the edges of the world were populated by strange races, people with no mouths who feed by breathing in smells, and people with dogs' heads or no heads. Our understanding of the world has increased so prodigiously that there's hardly a field of knowledge in which we might hope to find anything written in antiquity that is still essential reading today. However much we may admire the Greeks and Romans for their insights and progress in medicine, in science and engineering, no doctor or scientist or engineer would rely on a manual that was written two decades ago, let alone two millennia. I'd actually like to start by going even further back than two millennia, to the dawn of Greek literature in the eighth century BC. I'll read this text of Hesiod. The races of mankind once lived on the earth far removed from evils, from hard toil, and from painful illnesses, which bring death to mortals. But Pandora took the lid off her jar and scattered the contents, thus causing mankind dreadful sorrows.... The land is full of evils, and the sea is full of evils. Diseases come to mankind spontaneously by day and by night, bringing sorrow to mortals in silence. And here's another one from the same time, the eight century BC, from Homer himself. A doctor is worth as much as many other men together, since he is an expert at cutting out arrows and spreading gentle drugs on wounds. I won't be putting up all the quotations I'll be giving you, and I often won't even mention authors' names, but I'll be glad to give those afterwards. These passages are well worth quoting, not just because the Hesiod passage is such beautiful poetry, but because they give us an idea of the medical context in early Greek society. Hesiod explains diseases as having a divine origin, in Pandora's box, and Homer tells us that, while doctors are very valuable to have around, their expertise is pretty limited, really nothing more than treating wounds. Here is Aeneas having surgery. It come from a wall in Pompeii. You might, if you can make it out, you might look at the expression on Aeneas's face. I could have mentioned earlier, by the way, that another thing they didn't have was any proper anaesthetic in antiquity either. Aeneas looks as if he's fairly bored by the whole thing. The few portrayals that we have of any sort of surgery in ancient art do tend to omit the patient's agony. One of the qualifications suggested for being a good surgeon in antiquity was not just to be very strong and be dexterous and sympathetic to you patient, but also to be sympathetic but capable of withstanding the screams that he emits as he's operated on. The same is true of-- I'm not sure if the light is good on that one. The same is true in Christian art as well. In this picture we have the patron saints of medicine, Saints Damian and Cosmas, and they're giving a chap a leg replacement. The patient is taking it all very calmly. He's having a nice sleep while they saw his leg off and attach the new one. But I don't know if you can make it out on there, but you can probably see his leg lying at the foot of the bed there. That's the one they've just taken off. The one they're putting on now happened to come from a freshly dead black chap. I just wonder how he felt when he woke up and found that he'd be going around for the rest of his life one white leg and one black leg. But that is a famous miracle.

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Anyway, now Greek medicine as we might recognize it really starts in the fifth or the fourth century with Hippocrates. There is a picture of Hippocrates all gotten up as a sort of Byzantine saint. This may not be exactly what he looked like. I say that with great confidence, because it's not even sure that he ever existed.

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Actually, here's another one. There is Hippocrates with Galen, the other great doctor of antiquity who most certainly did exist. Hippocrates is such a shadowy figure that although there are about 70 treatises that are attributed to him, it's unlikely that he wrote any of them, especially if he's a bit of a composite figure, especially if he never really existed.

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Beg your pardon? >> Can you read the words on that for us? >> Actually, they're not worth reading because they're written in Latin, and both of these chaps wrote Greek.

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The writing is as false as probably their beards.

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Here's a quotation from the Hippocrates. And this, I'll keep putting this one up for a minute. If you wish to draw a large audience to hear you give a lecture, that is not a very commendable ambition. You should at any rate not quote poetry to endorse your views, for such earnest zeal suggests incompetence. Now, that's Hippocrates, and he's talking to doctors. He's not talking to the likes of me. I think I'm expected to quote poetry. Anyway, that's the last poetry you'll get from me, for tonight anyway. So what do we infer from that? Well, Hippocrates was a realist, but things were different then from the way they are now. Hippocrates was at least assuming that some doctors might think they could impress their patients if they could read 10 or 20 lines of Homer or whatever it might be. I mean, if your doctor does that these days, the first thing you would do, presumably, would be to change your doctor.

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I emphasize, I'm not mocking the Greeks for what they-- for that sort of sentiment that seems to display a rather primitive and unscientific state of medical practice. Certainly, that's not the way the Greeks themselves saw it. Here's another quotation from Hippocrates. When I say Hippocrates, there could be 70 different people writing these treatises, but I'll continue to call them that. However, this for a positive assertion, and bear in mind this is something of the order of two-and-a-half millennia ago. In my opinion, the present state of knowledge of medicine represents the complete discovery of the art, for it is able to give precise instructions about the nature of diseases and the important points about their treatment. Anyone who understands medicine in its present state does not rely at all on luck, for he would succeed with or without it. For the whole of medicine has been developed, and the excellent skills inherent in it clearly have very little need of luck. Now, maybe so--

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--but medicine in those says was bound up very closely with religion. I'm going to talk about religion now as a way to get shaded into a segue into talking about, specifically about, superstition in medicine. Here's a relief of the god of medicine sitting there, that large chap. That is Asclepius. And the very big girl standing beside him is his daughter Health, Hygeia. The people who are coming to pay homage to him are much smaller, so indeed is the bull that appears near the front of the line there. Gods are bigger, and for the most part better, than humans. Here are a couple of passages about Asclepius, just to remind you who exactly he was. Asclepius, the son of Apollo, was taught medicine by the Centaur Chiron. Athena gave him the blood that flowed from the Gorgon's veins, and with it he healed many people. He used the blood from the veins on the left side to kill people, and that from the veins on the right to cure them. It is said that he even restored dead people to life this way. In order to prevent mortals thinking Asclepius was a god, Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt. So Asclepius, the god of medicine, with some of this magic blood that he had, he cured people, but there was just as much of it that he used to kill people. Here's another quotation. This is from Plato actually. The tragedians say that Asclepius was the son of Apollo, and also that he was killed by a thunderbolt because he was bribed with gold to cure a rich man who was already on the point of dying. But I can't believe both these statements, for, if he was the son of a god, he was not money-grubbing, and if he was money-grubbing, he wasn't the son of a god. That's the god of medicine being suspected of having an interest in money, and that is something that we could investigate a lot more. It was one of the things that people were always saying about doctors in antiquity. Here's another picture of Asclepius on a coin from Epidaurus in the south of Greece, a place that was famous as having a great healing shrine in his honor. Asclepius there on the one side you see his head, on the other side you see him with his snake. The snake, the symbol of medicine even to this day. Here's why there this symbolism. Snakes are sacred to Asclepius. It's natural that Asclepius should have them as his

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since snakes slough off their old skin, they always look young, and likewise the god makes sick people look young when he casts away their illnesses like a snake-skin. Now, as I say, that coin is from Epidaurus, but amazingly there are over 700 sites in the Greek world, which of course includes Turkey, parts of Italy, the north coast of Africa and aura in the Mediterranean. But 700 places that have been identified as shrines to him, or in which he has at least some part. We should think of these places as-- They're more places to take the sick if regular medicine fails, rather than as rivals to the medical profession. Customer satisfaction was vital for the reputation and prosperity of a healing shrine. Here are some case histories that are found inscribed on large slabs set up in the fourth century BC at Epidaurus. They're there for potential clients, customers, patients to read and be impressed by. There's a lot of this stuff. Here's one case history. Gorgias from Heraclea, pus. This man suffered an arrow wound in the lung during a battle, and it suppurated so badly for a year and six months that he filled sixty-seven basins with pus. When he slept here, he saw a vision. The god seemed to remove the arrow head from his lung. In the morning he left the shrine cured, holding the arrow head in his hands. There are lots and lots more like that. But now, shrines have to keep a tight rein on their clients. They're not just healing centers, they're businesses as well, so prospective costumers and patients have to be warned that they have to pay up. Hermon from Thasos. Asclepius cured his blindness. The god later made him blind again because he did not make the offering for the cure, but, when he returned and slept in the temple, the god made him well again. There's an obvious moral there.

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I'll give just one more example of this religious element in medicine. It's rather gorgeous actually. A woman had a worm inside her, and the best doctors had given up hope of curing her. So she went to Epidaurus and begged Asclepius to flee her from the parasite. The god was not present, but the temple attendants laid the woman down where the god was accustomed to heal suppliants. She lay quietly, just as she was instructed. The god's ministers began the procedure necessary for the cure. They took her head off at the neck, then one of them inserted his hand into her body and extracted the worm, a big brute of a thing. But they couldn't fit her head back on correctly, the way it had been before. The god arrived and was angry with them for trying to do something that was beyond their capability. Then he himself, with his irresistible divine power, fitted her head back on her body, and restored the suppliant to health. Well, I mean--

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--there's a certain naivete possible in that, but as I go through the quotations that I'm giving you, don't so much as listen to anything I say, just listen to the quotations. Just say, is that what we do nowadays? I think you'll get the full force of it. It was common practice, when cured of an illness affecting a particular part of the body, to dedicate a picture or a carving of that body-part to the deity deemed responsible for the cure. There is a fine leg, and the inscription says that a woman called --, Fortune, gave this to Asclepius and Health, Hygeia, as a votive offering of thanks, a Eucharist --. There are thousands of these things. There are three there. There's another leg. You may not be able to see, there's a pair of eyes up in the far corner there.

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These are not eyes further down. These represent thanks. Here's another one, rather sharply defined ears there. This is actually a wee bit unusual. The inscription is in Latin. It comes from a later date than most of them, which would all be Greek. It says, Long ago, Cutius Gallus had vowed these ears to you, son of Apollo, i.e., Asclepius, and he placed them here when his ears were cured. Temples became so congested with such dedications that periodically the earlier offerings had to be removed from them for fresh ones to be put in. They were put in big pits, and they can be found there yet. There probably are lots more pits still to be excavated. One of them from an Etruscan town just north of Rome there were found over 400 terra cotta models of wombs, all about 20 centimeters long. Radiography has shown that nearly all of them, inside them, they contain a model of a fetus, about one centimeter long. These are all for the same thing. There were masses of these things. Someone in antiquity once complained that she couldn't see Health, the daughter of Asclepius, in the temple because the place was so clogged with dedicatory offerings. Now, I'm not inviting you really to consider Greek religion as superstition, but we certainly cross the line when we start to look at horoscopes and the influence of astrology on medicine. Here is a typical horoscope. If Saturn is in the seventh house, i.e. on the descendant, with a morning rising and in a diurnal chart-- I gave you all that not because I'm expecting that too many people will understand it. I don't. I can translate the words, but without going much further. I'm giving it to you to show that there is a technical expertise involved here. It's not just gobbledygook. It is worked out. Anyway, if that happens, he will be favorable, Saturn will be, and will grant great wealth, but only when those with such horoscopes have reached the threshold of old age. In this house, he bestows on them a very lengthy old age, and appoints them guardians of money. But he predicts pains in the hidden parts of the body, inflicting hemorrhoids or painful muscle spasms. That's from a whole big manual on astrology. You'll note, and this is absolutely typical, in contrast to their modern colleagues, astrologers in antiquity felt no compunction to accentuate the positive.

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You know, when you read your horoscope in the paper these days they don't tell you much about painful muscle spasms or hemorrhoids.

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Here's astrology in action in a medical context. This is quite long. Again, it's quoted from a different astrology manual. The way to make predictions based on when a patient takes to

Step One

Find out the number of days between the new moon before the person was born and his birthday. Divide that number by four. Make a note of the number of days left over after the division.

Step Two

Find out the number of days between the equivalent new moon and his birthday in the current year. Divide that number by four. Make a note of the remainder.

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Step Three

Find out the number of days from the new moon before he took to his bed and the day on which he took to his bed. Divide that number by four. Compare the remainder with the remainders in the previous two calculations. Is everybody with me here?

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Step Three

If all the three numbers are the same, the crisis is fatal; if they are different, the patient will survive, whatever the nature of his illness may be. Again, think about that in modern terms. If your doctor suggests any such calculations what would you do? Anyway-- Now, we may regard that as mere hocus-pocus, but what about this one. The Egyptian astrologers discovered that the moon foretells, not just for the sick but for healthy people also, whether to expect good days or bad days. I have kept a record of such predictions for my patients and find them to be perfectly accurate. The big thing about that is that the person who said that and said it so clearly and positively, he's no less a figure than the great Galen himself, antiquity's most influential doctor. And when I say 'the great Galen' the greatest doctor in antiquity, I know that's true, for he says in over and over again.

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For the ordinary person, magic was always an alternative to formal medicine. A lot of people simply couldn't afford it, hadn't the time for the treatment. Here's a quotation on this subject. The sort of medicine doctors administer at the patient's bedside is practically useless against fever, so I shall propose several remedies advocated by magicians. That comes from Pliny's Natural History, which doesn't really tell you anything about the context. Pliny's Natural History is a catchall of just about everything that anybody wrote about in antiquity. He said it contains 20,000 facts. He set out to write a work with 20,000 facts in it. Which is an appalling ambition to have, I think. But not as appalling as the achievement of the scholar who counted the facts.

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It worked out that Pliny had got it wrong. There are nearly 40,000 of them. I want to talk now about magic, pure and simple. It doesn't matter where this comes from. The experts say that it is vital that a poultice for an abscess should be applied by a naked virgin when both she and the patient have been fasting. The girl should touch the patient with the back of her hand and say, "Apollo says that no one's disease can grow worse if a naked virgin checks it." She should say this three times with her hand turned over, and both she and the patient should spit three times. Okay.

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I might say in passing that people in antiquity always seem to have had a certain amount of trouble with poultices and plasters. In his collection of prescriptions for drugs, the first century Roman courtier for Claudius, Scribonius Largus, commends a particular type of plaster as being, "very serviceable for wounds and bites, for inhibiting tumors and pus, and," this is the good bit, "for not falling off if worn in the baths." In other words, most people who went to the baths, their pus, poisonous laden-- You get the picture. It wasn't very nice. Another one, A person with a pain in his stomach or intestines will obtain relief if he sees birds swimming, especially a duck.

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Moistening a child's skull with a cold sponge and then tying a frog belly up to his head is a very effective treatment for heatstroke. I could spend the rest of this evening just continuing with recommendations for treatment like that. So please admire my restraint. That's it.

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Step Three

There are hundreds of them from all sorts of sources. Harvesting ingredients for charms and medical prescriptions was surrounded with a magic aura, the sort of thing we associate with the witches in Macbeth. Here's a quotation on this. Some of the things that drug sellers and root cutters say are, I suppose, reasonable enough, but sometimes they make such a song and dance with their exaggerated claims. It seems incredibly far-fetched that, for example, peonies should be dug up only at night, for fear that, if a person is seen by a woodpecker while he is gathering their flowers, he risks going blind, whereas, if he is seen by a woodpecker while he is cutting the root, he may suffer a prolapsed anus. That sounds a bit curious, but it comes from Theophrastus. He was Aristotle's successor, and he was nobody's fool. Now, he's not buying into this superstition, but he feels it necessary to react against what was obviously a very widely held belief. Here's another one on gathering ingredients. This is a famous ritual. Mandrake is what we're talking about here. Mandrake was frequently used in medicines, especially because it has narcotic proprieties and was vaguely human shape in its root. It was commonly associated with magic. Josephus describes how mandrake gatherers avoid the deadly root. They dig a furrow round it, leaving just a very short part of the root in the earth. Then they tie a dog to the root. When the dog rushes to follow the person who tied it there, the root is pulled easily out of the ground, but the dog dies at once, as a substitute for the person who's trying to harvest the plant. And then he says, (There is no danger in picking it up once the dog's dead.) Despite all these risks, it has one property which makes it

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so-called demons, that's to say the spirits of evil people, enter the bodies of the living and kill them if they receive no help; a simple application of mandrake quickly drives them out. Well, in case it looks as if I'm really just, when it all comes down, I'm just making fun of ancient medicine and its achievements, and not taking it seriously enough, let me assure you that I have the greatest admiration for the commitment and selflessness of Greek doctors. How could anyone not be impressed by Hippocrates' statement that, Earwax is a fatal sign if it is sweet, but not if it is bitter. I'll give you a moment to think about that.

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How did they find out if it was sweet or bitter? Well, we have another passage. This time from Galen, the other great doctor, who tells that you didn't just give it to a slave to tell him to test it. He says, Many doctors think that they should personally taste a patient's sweat or his earwax, for they think they can draw deductions even from this. All I can say is, more power to them, that they would do that. But now, going back to magic and superstition. The importance of magic and superstition in medicine is confirmed by the widespread use of amulets. Here's one, A salamander is a four-footed creature, bigger than a green lizard, that lives in thickets and woodlands. If a woman wears one attached to her knee, she will not conceive nor will she have a period. Now, okay--

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Attached to your knee? Well, anyway, let me give you another one. Take several threads, preferably dyed with sea purple, put them round the throat of a viper, and choke it. Then tie all the threads round your own neck. This amulet gives amazing relief from tonsillitis and any growths in the region of the neck. That would just be nothing if it weren't for the fact that that again, come from Galen. He's willing to give some authority to the power of amulets. There was another great doctor who doesn't have the same cashe, he's not such a household name nowadays. A chap who wrote a gynecology called Soranus, a work, by the way, that has been severely under-rated and ignored until quite recently. He says that, Some doctors say that amulets are effective. I myself have no time for them. Even so, we should not forbid the wearing of amulets; they may not provide any direct relief, but they do perhaps make our patients more cheerful through the hope that they inspire That's perceptive enough. I want now to talk about epilepsy for a moment. Epilepsy was the most intimidating illness in antiquity. The Greeks and Romans made no progress with it. The lack of understanding comes out in the fact that-- You can see it in the fact that they called it the sacred disease, an affliction sent by the gods and one that humans were not expected to comprehend. So it's no wonder that suggested cures often have a strong hint of mere superstition. Here's one, and don't listen if you've just had dinner.

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Epileptics drink the blood of gladiators, from living cups, as it were. It is an appalling sight to see wild animals drink the blood of gladiators in the arena, and yet those who suffer from epilepsy think it the most effective cure for their disease, absorbing a person's warm blood while he is still breathing and drawing out his actual living soul straight from his wounds, even though it is not human to apply one's lips even to the wounds of wild beasts. Other people seek a cure through eating the leg marrow and brains of infants. That's cannibalism. I don't know why people don't make more fuss about it. That sort of stands out, drinking blood like that. We do hear about it more than once. Here's one that's not quite so edgy. As a cure for epilepsy, the physician Artemon, who's someone we don't know any more about, he gave patients water to drink from a spring gathered by night, to be drunk from the skull of a person who had been killed but not cremated. Well, what's that? That is superstition. They say that epilepsy can be cured by eating the flesh of a wild animal killed with a weapon with which a human being has already been killed. This must be hocus pocus. I want just to give you a couple of other treatments. One is for rabies and one is for gout. They've actually got nothing to do with superstition, but they're worth hearing. They do show you how far both doctors and patients were willing to go. When a wound caused by a mad dog is not properly treated, the patient usually develops a fear of water (what the Greeks call hydrophobia), and he is tortured simultaneously by thirst and by fear of water. There is little hope for victims of this condition. The only remedy is to throw him suddenly into a swimming pool. If he does not know how to swim, he is left to sink and drink, then he's pulled to the surface, the process is repeated again and again. If he can swim, he is pushed under several times, so that he is filled up, however reluctantly, with water. By this means, both his thirst and his fear of water are relieved. Well--

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Here's a cure for gout. You should have your patient, when he is having an attack, stand on the sea shore, not the dry beach, but right at the edge of the water, with his feet on a black electric eel. He should do this till he feels numbness in his whole foot and his leg as far as the knee. This not just stops the pain on this particular occasion, it prevents it recurring in the future. I don't know, maybe that one's not quite so daft. But it's the method in which it's done. Nowadays I don't think the-- Actually, no, six weeks ago I was in Cambodia and I had my feet nibbled by little fish which was meant to cure calluses and stuff like that. So maybe this black electric eel-- I withdraw what I said about black electric eels. That sounds pretty sensible to me. Anyway, I want to talk now a little bit about anatomy. Anatomy is very-- It's a serious thing for antiquity because it's probably the greatest handicap that ancient medical research had. That was, the absolute ban on dissection of human bodies at almost all periods. This severely restricted progress in anatomy, and it left a vacuum for ignorance to come into. In the early stages, the Greeks' views of anatomy seems fairly daft, but bear in mind-- I'm going to give you two quotations now. This first one comes from Plato himself, and the second comes from Empedocles, who was one of his most influential predecessors. Pluto says, The gods imitated the spherical nature of the universe when they enclosed the soul in a spherical body, that is to say, in what we now call the head, the most divine part of the body and the one which rules over all the other parts... and, to prevent it from rolling around on the ground, they provided the head with the body as a convenient means of transportation. {laughter] Nothing else. Now, this notion of free ranging heads isn't quite as bizarre as Empedocles' vision of creation before evolution ensured the survival of the fittest. He said, Many heads grew without necks, and arms roamed around naked, lacking shoulders, and eyes wandered alone, deprived of foreheads. I mean, you'd think it came from some absurd comedy. There was plenty of that in antiquity. But no, that's Empedocles. It should be taken seriously, but it's hard to. Now, here's a quotation from Aristotle, just to show you how little was actually known about anatomy. He says-- Oops, sorry, I left that one out. I got carried away and left out a couple of quotations there. Most of the external parts of the body have specific names, and familiarity with them makes them well known. The opposite is true of the internal organs; the inner parts of a human being are largely unknown, and hence we have to inspect the various parts of other animals with a nature comparable to ours. Here are a couple of guesses about the mysterious internal organs. They're both about the spleen. I think we've moved on a bit from this. But this is from Rufus of Ephesus who was a serious doctor. He says, The spleen does nothing and has no function. Okay? Now, Saint Isidore, the bishop of Seville in the second century who's the patron saint of the Internet. He's very interested in words. In his Etymologies he compares the word spleen, or splen, to the word supplementum, supplement. He says that, The spleen is so called because it fills up the part opposite the liver, to ensure that the space is not empty. It just takes him a bit longer to say that the spleen does nothing. What I would like to do now is to gather together a range of quotations all on related themes, and all or nearly all, having something to do with superstition, or at least ignorance and prejudice. The common factor here is sex and childbirth, but it might have just as easily have been, for example, diet, or drugs, or preventive medicine. It's always appropriate to start with Hippocrates. And, as I say, would a doctor these days have said this, Unrestrained fornication cures dysentery.

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Here is another one which I rather like. It's based on the theory of the four humors, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. It was actually a false start, but it lingered for a very long time. He says, Hippocrates again, Anyone who becomes bald is of a phlegmatic nature. During sexual intercourse, the phlegm in their head is tossed around and heats up, and when it encounters the epidermis, it burns the roots of the hairs, which then fall out. Eunuchs don't become bald for this same reason, for they do not undergo this strong movement that takes place during intercourse, and hence the phlegm does not heat up and burn the hair roots. So you don't get bald eunuchs. Now, going on, this is from Paul of Aegina who is, again, a respected doctor, much later. He says, For those who have no enthusiasm for sex and are depressed about it, burn a lizard 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. If you want to stop, wash the mixture off your toe. By the way, you'll notice he said, the right foot. You don't want to get that wrong. These recommendations, they always have something so specific it kind of forces you to believe it's right. But I don't know, I've never had that one tested.

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I think I'll leave that one out. Men with large penises are not as fertile as men with average-sized penises, for sperm is unproductive if it is cold, and sperm that has too far to travel turns cold. That's from Aristotle.

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So maybe there's something to it. A very influential man, Aristotle was. I recently read an article that set out to prove that the Greeks preferred small penises to large penises, but I can't find any relevant way to bring this into my talk tonight. Well, I thought I'd mention it anyway. It's great being an academic, because you can spend so much time on things like that. Sexual intercourse gives relief to a man who has been bitten by a snake or stung by a scorpion, but it harms the woman who is his partner. Hmmm. I'm coming up how to pregnancy and childbirth. If a woman does not conceive, and you wish to ascertain whether she ever will, wrap her in blankets and fumigate her lower body. If it appears that the smoke passes up through her body to her nose and mouth, you may be sure that she is not infertile. Here's a famous passage of Plato from the Timaeus, in fact. There it is. Men's genitals are by nature disobedient and self-willed,

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like some living animal that won't listen to reason, goaded by-- Ladies, wait.

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goaded by its desires to try to control everything. Likewise in women and for the same reasons, the womb is like a creature shut in and longing to produce children, and whenever it remains unproductive for a long time beyond its due season, it complains and takes it hard. It wanders about everywhere through the body, blocking the channels needed for breath and thus preventing respiration. In so doing, it engenders extreme distress and causes all sorts of diseases. That's the wandering womb that people believed in for so long. There is chauvinism in some of this next stuff. If a woman is pregnant with twins and one of her breasts shrivels up, she loses one of the children, the boy if it is her right breast, the girl if it is her left. That's Hippocrates. A pregnant woman has a better complexion and an easier delivery if the child is a boy, but the fetus is hard to carry and her legs and groin swell if it is a girl. Pregnant women with freckles on their face give birth to a girl. Those who retain a good complexion generally give birth to a boy. If the mother's nipples are turned upwards, it is a boy, if downwards, a girl. I said I have no medical knowledge, maybe I'm on thin ice here. Maybe this is all true. But here's one I can guarantee is not. It is said that if someone takes a stone or some other missile that has slain three living creatures, a human being, a wild boar, and a bear, at three blows, and throws it over the roof of a house in which there is a pregnant woman, she will immediately give birth, no matter how difficult her labor is. Again, on delivery. If delay in giving birth becomes life-threatening, news should be brought suddenly to the pregnant woman that a family member, whether her husband, or her father, or her mother, or her brother, or her son, has died or been murdered. She'll then give birth.

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When a woman is having a difficult labor, fumigating her with the fat from a hyena's lower back will ensure immediate delivery. Placing a hyena's right paw on a woman in labor makes delivery easy, but even moving a left paw over her is deadly. Again, you have to be careful, right and left. It matters. If childbirth causes a woman's breasts to swell, they can be restored to their normal size with a drink of mouse droppings in rain water. I could talk a long time about the use of feces, human and otherwise in medicine and in veterinary medicine. There was an awful lot of it. They were not as squeamish as we are. I think I'll leave that one out.

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Actually, I think I'm probably running out of time now, so I'm going to wind up with-- There's one thing I really do have to quote. You'll notice every time I've talked about doctors I've been assuming that we're talking about men. That's true. Doctors in antiquity nearly always were men. The word was --, that same as in our word psychiatrist and things like that. There was a female for of it, --. And we do, in fact, have some funeral depictions of women doctors. But they were very few and far between. Let me just read you a funeral inscription for a woman doctor. It's written by her husband, a doctor who's honoring his wife and fellow doctor. He says, Farewell, my wife, Pantheia, from your husband, who has inconsolable grief after your devastating death. Hera the goddess of marriage has never before beheld such a wife, excelling in beauty, and wisdom. All the children you bore resemble me, and you took care of your husband and your children. You kept the tiller of our domestic life on a straight course, and you exalted our shared reputation as doctors. Nor, even though you are a woman, did you fall short of me in skill. What a way to end it. That rather spoiled it, even though you're a woman. Dear me. The prejudice was there. One thing I find difficult to understand about women doctors in antiquity is how they got outside the field of gynecology. The Greeks had such entrenched prejudices I really cannot imagine a Greek man going to a woman doctor. But maybe there are other people who can tell me about that. I do find it a bit of a problem. Oh, yes. Oh, no, look, I think I'll just stop now. I've quite a lot more material but I'm sure I've taken advantage of your patience long enough. Thank you very much for listening.

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