2019/10/02 by William V. Harris · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · #History of Medicine Studies #Complementary and Alternative Medicine Studies #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrz057
openalex publication_date 2019/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In the classical world, "official" rationalistic medicine made therapeutic use of excrement, urine and other substances that modern humans normally regard as repulsive (this was even true of Galen, the culminating authority); and popular medicine seems to have done so on a large scale. Such practices, which finally lost their professional though not their popular acceptability in the 18th century, have been studied to good purpose by other historians, but they have never been explained in a satisfactory fashion, partly because the relevant evidence is highly diverse. The present paper, by considering the long term (pre-Greek as well as Greek and Roman) and all the relevant contexts, including ancient feelings of disgust and the general state of ancient pharmacology, and by probing people's subconscious motives, attempts to establish a multi-factor explanation. This explanation balances traditions, beliefs about the inherent qualities, physical and magical, of natural substances, and the psychological needs of both healers and the sick.