MISGUIDED MEDICINE HALL OF FAME
PLINY THE ELDER
23 to 79 CE • ROMAN EMPIRE
Gaius Plinius Secundus was born in 23 CE, and died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. In those 56 or so years, Pliny the Elder was a soldier, navy commander, politician, researcher, naturalist, and probably other stuff he was just too busy to tell anybody about. His magnum opus, Natural History, is a massive accounting of all the plants and animals and basically everything in the known world of his time. It was the model for the encyclopedia as we know it. He probably died while trying to rescue a family friend during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
We wanted to get Pliny’s bafflingly diverse achievements out in front of you, dear reader, in the hopes that they’ll buy him a bit of mercy later in this book when we start ruthlessly dunking on him for being wrong about just about everything in the realm of medicine. We try to remember that Pliny was working with a staggeringly primitive knowledge of anatomy and biology. Pliny, notably, did not keep this fact in mind when bloviating about maladies, treatments, and anything else in his field of vision. Don’t take our word for it, just check out some of his greatest hits (there were a lot to choose from, but after a while it all starts to sound the same, so we decided on a nice sampling of home remedies you really, really don’t want to try).
For the cure of cataract, the ashes of a weasel are used, as also the brains of a lizard or swallow. Weasels, boiled and pounded, and so applied to the forehead, allay defluxions of the eyes, either used alone, or else with fine flour or with frankincense.
TOOTH CARE
Hollow teeth are plugged with ashes of burnt mouse dung, or with a lizard’s liver, dried. To eat a snake’s heart, or to wear it, attached to the body, is considered highly efficacious. There are some among the magicians, who recommend a mouse to be eaten twice a month, as a preventive of tooth-ache.
MENSTRUATION
Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.
EPILEPSY
To cure epilepsy, eat the heart of a black jackass, outside, on the second day of the moon. Alternatively, eat lightly poached bear testes, a dried camel brain with honey, or drink fresh gladiator’s blood.
WRINKLES
Maidenhair leaves steeped in the urine of a boy not yet adolescent, if they be pounded with saltpeter and applied to the abdomen of women, prevent the formation of wrinkles.
BLOODSHOT EYES
When the eyes are bloodshot from the effects of a blow, or affected with pain or defluxion, it is a very good plan to inject woman’s milk into them, more particularly in combination with honey and juice of daffodil, or else powdered frankincense.