Читать книгу The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity - Roy Porter - Страница 25

Greek medicine spread throughout the Mediterranean, not least to Italy, where the southern cities shared Greek culture – doctors at Elea, Tarentum and Metapontum were like their colleagues in Athens or Alexandria. Rome was different. No-nonsense Roman tradition held that one was better off without doctors. Romans had no need of professional physicians, insisted authors like Cato (234–149 BC), for they were hale and hearty, unlike the effete Greeks. ‘Beware of doctors’, he cried; they would bring death by medicine. ‘It is our duty, my young friends’, reflected Cicero (106–43 BC), ‘to resist old age; to compensate for its defects by a watchful care; to fight against it as we would fight against disease; to adopt a regimen of health; to practise moderate exercise; and to take just enough food and drink to restore our strength and not to overburden it.’

Romans enjoyed bad-mouthing Greek physicians: according to Pliny (AD C. 23–79), who deplored the recent influx of ‘luxury’ and worthless Greek physicians, an inscription, echoing Alexander, was now sprouting up on monuments in Rome: ‘It was the crowd of physicians that killed me.’^*

Romans liked to think healing should take place in the family, under the care of the paterfamilias, who would dispense herbs and charms. Cato, who dosed his family on cabbage soup, derided Greek physicians as the antithesis of Roman virtue: they were frauds who cheated patients and ‘have sworn to kill all barbarians with their drugs’. Prejudices such as these may explain the tardy emergence of native Italian physicians.

The contrast drawn by Cato and Pliny between homespun healing and hellenistic speculation was xenophobic prejudice. The real difference was not between Greece and Rome, but between rustic medicine and that of the big city. Greek medicine arrived with city life as Rome was hellenized. For long professional doctors (medici) in Italy were immigrants; the first noted Roman practitioner, Asclepiades (c. 120–30 BC), was a native of Bithynia in Asia Minor. Modified by his pupil, Themison of Tralles (fl. 70 BC), his doctrines gave rise to the Methodist sect. Its physiology was based not upon the Hippocratic four humours but upon corpuscular theory. In the body the proper arrangement of atoms and their intermediate pores produced health; any obstruction or undue looseness led to disease, so health was the balance between tension and relaxation. This atomist physiology enabled the doctor to reduce diagnosis to the ‘common conditions’ – the constricted, the lax and the mixed – deducible from visible symptoms. Hence the Asclepiadean or Methodist doctor did not need intimate familiarity with the life history of his patients: plain symptoms were sufficient. Cure was by opposites, enlarging narrow pores and reducing large ones, for which Asclepiades promoted massage, exercise and cold-water bathing. His slogan cito, tute et jucunde – swiftly, safely, sweetly – is reflected in his rejection of heroic bleeding, his preference for gentle medicines, his prescription of wine and his stress on convalescence. Self-styled Asclepiadeans nourished for three centuries, though their rejection of philosophical reasoning riled Galen, who sneered at their pre-packed therapies.

More light on the infiltration of Greek medicine into Rome is offered by the physician Scribonius Largus (c. AD 1–50). Born in Sicily, he probably learned his craft from hellenistic practitioners on the island, and in AD 43 he accompanied the Emperor Claudius on his campaign to subdue Britain. His sole surviving medical text is a Latin handbook of drug recipes, the Compositiones. It contains 271 recipes for conditions from headache to gout, all claimed of proven value. In his preface, Scribonius set out his views on medical ethics, becoming our earliest witness to the use of the Hippocratic oath. How widespread was his endorsement of a professional ethic is unclear, for no other ancient writer made such an open commitment.

The early empire brought the first surviving survey of medicine in Latin. An encyclopaedic compilation, Celsus’ Artes [The Sciences] originally contained at least twenty-one books, of which only the eight devoted to medicine survive in full. No professional physician but a wealthy estate owner who presumably treated his family and friends, Celsus (fl. AD c. 30) was acquainted with both theory and treatments, writing in an elegant Latin which won him the title of the Cicero of the physicians.

The eight books are introduced by a long preface tracing the story of medicine from the time of the Trojan war, and lamenting the rise of clashing sects: Dogmatists, who stressed the need to seek out unseen causes; Empirics, whose emphasis was on experience; and Methodists, wedded to ‘common conditions’. Medicine, in Celsus’ view, required not just experience but reason.

Celsus’ first book is on the preservation of health and on diet; Book 2 deals with signs the doctor should watch for, and remedies; Book 3 concerns diseases of the whole body – fevers, jaundice and so on; Book 4 lists the diseases of individual body parts in the top-to-toe order which was to become customary; and the lengthy Book 5 falls into two parts, a description of various drugs, and treatments for bites and ulcers. Book 6 handles treatments of diseases of the parts of the body, again from top to bottom. Subsequent books deal with surgery, opening with a brief history of the art, and moving on to a list of surgical conditions occurring anywhere in the body, before examining surgical techniques for individual parts, again from head to heel. The final book deals with fractures, ruptures and luxations, including such ambitious operations as removal of bone splinters from the skull. After surgery the physician must be alert to the four cardinal signs of inflammation – calor, rubor, dolor and tumor (heat, redness, pain and swelling). As the first major medical author writing in Latin and offering a summary of the whole of medicine in a single work, Celsus exercised a powerful influence.

The medical colossus of the Roman era is Galen (AD 129-c. 216), but he had significant contemporaries who stand in his shadow, in part because he belittled them, in part because their works, unlike his, survive only in fragments. One was Aretaeus of Cappadocia (fl. AD 140) who proclaimed his loyalties by writing in Greek and frequently alluding to Hippocrates. His work, known in Latin as De causis et signis acutorum et diuturnorum morborum [Acute and Chronic Diseases] provides the best disease descriptions of any surviving ancient author. A ‘rationalist’, he inclined to the pneumatic school, believing that in the universe and in man alike, pneuma (spirit) bound everything together, and any change in it led to illness.

Aretaeus made disease the hub of his inquiries, recording nothing about his patients – or himself for that matter. He gave fine descriptions, among other things, of dropsy and diabetes, mental disorders and epilepsy. Diabetes represented ‘a liquefaction of the flesh and bones into urine’, so much so that ‘the kidneys and bladder do not cease emitting urine’. His description of tetanus gives evidence of his clinical experience:

Tetanus consists of extremely painful spasms, which are a peril to life and very difficult to relieve. The attack begins in the jaw muscles and tendons, but spreads to the whole body, because all bodily parts suffer in sympathy with the one first affected.

There are three types of spasms. Either the body is stretched, or it is bent either backward or forward. With stretching the disease is called tetanus: the subject is so rigid that he cannot tarn or bend. The spasms are named according to the tension and the position of the forward and backward arching. When the posterior nerves are affected and the patient arches backward, we call the condition opisthotonus; when the anterior nerves are affected and the arching is forward, the condition is called emprosthotonus.

Another doctor then active was Soranus, practising in Ephesus AD C. IOO. His Gynaecology, the largest early treatment of that subject, should be understood in the context of traditional Hippocratic thinking on the diseases of women, which presumably reflected prevailing male prejudices. Children born at seven months were said, implausibly, to have a greater chance of surviving than those born at eight; the ‘wandering womb’ was blamed for hysteria-like illnesses; and the female constitution was an imperfect version of the male. Soranus, however, was sceptical of many of these traditions, and dismissive of the ‘wandering womb’. His Gynaecology, which enjoyed wide circulation, is divided into four sections. The first, dealing with conception and pregnancy, also discusses virginity and the right age for intercourse (not before menarche, at about fourteen). Advice was given on contraception, though Soranus disapproved of abortion by mechanical means. The next section treats labour, recommending the sitting position and the Roman birthing-chair. In case of difficult labour, he taught ‘podalic version’ – easing a hand into the uterus and pulling down one of the baby’s legs, so that it would be born feet-first. The third part examines women’s maladies, including uterine fluxes and womb-caused diseases, and the final section is concerned with problems in the birth itself: how to remove the placenta after birth and tie the umbilical cord.

Another physician associated with Ephesus was Rufus (AD 70–120), who learnt anatomy in Alexandria and spent some time in Rome. He wrote commentaries on several Hippocratic writings, accepting the doctrine of the four humours and of cure by opposites. His writings were praised by Galen. Galen’s sun, however, outshone his ideas, as it did everyone else’s.