I'm always fascinated by the 'correctness' [1] of medicinal treatments in ancient times. Here, the paper explains that the ash tonic effectively served as a mineral supplement to promote bone healing. Is it just coincidence that they medicated in this manner, and it ended up being beneficial? Did they somehow know that the tonic was effective for these means? If so, how? Or is this just me weighting the 'correct' choice of remedies higher than the likely multitude of faulty choices that were made in those times?
[1] Poor choice of word, but can't think of a better one
A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire.
They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments "progress" through history as the efficacious ones win adherents and the ones that don't work fall out of favor. The problem with this is that the most popular medical treatment in the European and Islamic world for 2,000 years (bleeding) was medically worthless (well, unless you happen to have very high blood pressure).
So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg).
In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
> So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people
You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
I just read in "the lives and opinions of eminent philosophers" written ca 300 AD that Pythagoras (yes that Pythagoras) was the inventor of the "meat for athletes" diet. He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator.
Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
This post seems unrelated to my comment. Did you mean to respond to a different comment?
> He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator.
If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves.
> Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
David Deutsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch) has an interesting take on explaining why intelligent people in history did not converge on the correct theories sooner (not just in medicine, e.g. in physics, so noise created by placebo effect does not explain those), namely that if you have what he terms a bad theory empiricism or intelligence will not let you iterate to the correct solution as most people assume. You can be stuck at a local minimum.
Phlogiston theory is utterly wrong as an explanation for fire, but it "saves the appearances" (conforms to observable physical phenomena) quite well. I think Thomas Kuhn talks about it as an example of a mindset that required a paradigm shift to be thought about differently in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which seems to be along similar lines as what I gather is Deutsch's Karl Popper-influenced take on scientific knowledge-making.
Once in a while, we find out that crazy ideas of the ancients have some basis in truth. For example, "epigenetics" is something that has been around since the ancient Greeks. Eveyrone who learns biology "learns" that Lamarck was a quack. Now, well, maybe he was kinda right somehow. The ancients weren't stupid. They may even have had more native intelligence than we do, since breeding patterns were still eugenic in the past (aka dumb people were killed off).
Similarly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if leeches and bleeding had some health giving effect. Perhaps it allows your body to make more appropriate white blood cells when you are sick.
BTW, can you recommend some good popular books on this subject? "Devils drugs and doctors" was one of my all time fave reads.
> Eveyrone who learns biology "learns" that Lamarck was a quack.
I wouldn't say that. Lamarck's theory wasn't pulled out of his ass; it fit the facts available to him, just like the phlogiston theory did. It happened to be wrong, but it wasn't because Lamarck was stupid.
Incidentally, leeches actually do have a place in modern medicine: after reconstructive surgery, they can be used to draw blood out of the affected area in a gentle, controlled fashion, reducing swelling and internal clotting and letting the several blood vessels heal much more reliably. This has nothing to do with the ancient use of leeches, though.
Athletes tend to stick to the same ritualized routine for months and years, which minimizes variables and helps them figure out which remedy really works.
My guess is that there is a capacity for instinct that leads some people to find the correct remedy for themselves. The way people with mineral deficiency might crave soil, could be similar to the way shamans in South America 'knew' to combine an MAOI found in one variety of tree bark with the DMT containing plant - out of tens of thousands of plant species.
I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another.
Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.
I was reading about Romans and lead poisoning on HN a couple weeks ago. I think this is just one case where it didn't happen to work out disastrously, but in many other cases the remedy was much worse than the disease.
"The result shows that gladiators mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population." Meals consisted primarily of grain and meat-free meals. The word "barley eater" relates in this case to the fact that gladiators were probably given grain of an inferior quality."
1) You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment.
2) You don't even bother to waste good grain on them.
3) Most people ate a mostly vegetarian diet, meat is expensive and hard to transport.
While this is true, it was a blood-sport. When a soccer player loses a match, he/she can go on to win later. If you lose a duel to the death, you're dead.
Throughly trained gladiators were expected to last several years because the training was expensive. Blood from being wounded was usually enough, as soon as a gladiator was wounded he would have to plead for mercy because his chances against a skilled opponent were now nil.
There was also a referee. On occasion a gladiator would be killed or not receive mercy from the crowd. Most gladiators showed healed wounds on their bones.
Untrained people were thrown in the arena with the expectation of death. It was a favored form of execution.
Elite gladiators vs. the newly arrived cannon-fodder... I would imagine they had very different qualities of life. After all the elite attended social functions with high society and were pimped out...
Food is an incredibly ideologized topic, and closely linked to identity. This can affect how we deal with information contradicting our beliefs and habits in this regard.
(Science Daily should take that into account and provide context, e.g. avoiding to imply one way is better than the other and provide context by giving a summary of current knowledge on diet...)
> mostly ate a vegetarian diet. There is virtually no difference in terms of nutrition from the local "normal population."
I would consider that to be a normal diet, even today I know I don't each meat everyday. My mother told me her family on the farm in the 1950s only had meat once per week at the Sunday dinner, sometimes not. This was normal for this region people were not called vegetarians it was just a normal diet; meat was expensive and hard to store.
>drank ashes after training as a tonic.
I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength.
I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength.
It has nothing to do with that. In Greece where I live, in the past ashes were used to filter water. Even today it’s used in pastries as in bakery because it helps in digestion and cleans the bowel from infections.
It has dozens of other uses, from cleaning dishes and pottery to fertilizer (that’s why some of the best wines are produced in places where used to be volcanoes). It can also drive insects like ants and roaches away, can be used in soaps, on open wounds to help disinfection, etc.
"Basic" works here, but as an alternative you might consider "alkaline" (which pulls double duty, both as "related to the alkali metals" and "has a pH over 7").
Most days I don't eat meat, but the average in the US is 13 ounces per person per day. My impression is that the majority of people I know eat meat at least two meals per day. I'd guess that's the highest in the world, but I don't know for sure.
Or Denmark. From Wikipedia:
--
With 145.9 kg (321.7 lb) of meat per person consumed in 2002, Denmark has the highest consumption of meat per person of any country in the world.
> The vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators."
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] thread[1] Poor choice of word, but can't think of a better one
They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
So were all premodern doctors idiots who couldn't practice empiricism? Well, no - many of them are extremely intelligent, inquisitive people (people like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle accepted bleeding as a treatment, so clearly "they weren't smart" or "they didn't understand the scientific method" isn't a good explanation). I think the answer is two pronged. One is simply that the placebo effect is extremely powerful, so even cures that we consider not to be efficacious in a clinical setting still "worked" in daily practice as placebos. The second is to look more closely at what someone with the scientific mind of Robert Boyle made of bleeding. He actually did do quasi-experimental trials involving blood loss and concluded that "excessive" bleeding was bad for human health. By the same token, he started doing chemical assays of various mineral and animal-based cures (like eating burnt lizards for epilepsy, and things like that) and began to lay the foundations for our later (18th/19th century) understanding of which minerals and vitamins are essential for human health. It's entirely possible that Greco-Roman doctors were doing similar things, but Boyle had the benefit of the ready dissemination of his findings via print and the world's first scientific journal (Philosophical Transactions), which happened to be edited by his close associate (Henry Oldenberg).
In short I think there was a kind of practical empiricism at work in the history of medicine that has always existed. But that it didn't begin to coalesce into clinical effective treatments until print culture made it possible for people to share their findings on a global level. This wasn't a simple march out of ignorance toward truth, though. And the reason for this is that the placebo effect of remedies like bleeding often "worked" just as well as the partially-effective treatments of premodern times, like, for instance, supplementing poor diets by eating the ashes of various animal and plant products.
You also have to accept that even extremely intelligent people view evidence through the lens of their preconceptions. This can be a difficult thing to escape.
Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
I heard that's mostly a myth
edit:
there was apparently different Pythagoras, who was a boxer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(boxer)
> He also won a gold medal in the Olympics for boxing so he was not just an ivory tower speculator.
If you are attempting to respond directly to my comment, then I don't see how being an athlete himself (even though that fact seems debatable) somehow means that his ideas aren't coloured in some way by his preconceptions. This has nothing to do with being in an 'ivory tower,' but instead to do with mapping the evidence to pre-conceived ideas and then calling it a day without questioning those idea themselves.
> Meat in those days was regarded as an expensive luxury.
It was an expensive luxury. I don't think that anyone is debating this. Even in China you can map the increase in consumption of meat to the rise of the Chinese middle-class in recent years.
If you have 15mins, watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Phlogiston theory is utterly wrong as an explanation for fire, but it "saves the appearances" (conforms to observable physical phenomena) quite well. I think Thomas Kuhn talks about it as an example of a mindset that required a paradigm shift to be thought about differently in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which seems to be along similar lines as what I gather is Deutsch's Karl Popper-influenced take on scientific knowledge-making.
Similarly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if leeches and bleeding had some health giving effect. Perhaps it allows your body to make more appropriate white blood cells when you are sick.
BTW, can you recommend some good popular books on this subject? "Devils drugs and doctors" was one of my all time fave reads.
I wouldn't say that. Lamarck's theory wasn't pulled out of his ass; it fit the facts available to him, just like the phlogiston theory did. It happened to be wrong, but it wasn't because Lamarck was stupid.
Incidentally, leeches actually do have a place in modern medicine: after reconstructive surgery, they can be used to draw blood out of the affected area in a gentle, controlled fashion, reducing swelling and internal clotting and letting the several blood vessels heal much more reliably. This has nothing to do with the ancient use of leeches, though.
I know from my own experience that foods I hated as a kid turned out to be pretty bad for me - cauliflower, peanut butter, white bread, tomatoes - have real negative effects for one reason or another. On the other side, foods that I've craved at certain times like oranges or almonds, were counteracting a deficiency of one thing or another.
Of course, once this works once, the person who it worked for would spread the word for others with a similar problem.
Much of the stone architecture ruins still stand, including an ampitheater, library, bathhouses, and much more.
1) You don't waste expensive food on people who are about to die stabbing each other to death for your entertainment.
2) You don't even bother to waste good grain on them.
3) Most people ate a mostly vegetarian diet, meat is expensive and hard to transport.
you have no idea. Gladiators were something like sport celebrities.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator#Combat
There was also a referee. On occasion a gladiator would be killed or not receive mercy from the crowd. Most gladiators showed healed wounds on their bones.
Untrained people were thrown in the arena with the expectation of death. It was a favored form of execution.
(Science Daily should take that into account and provide context, e.g. avoiding to imply one way is better than the other and provide context by giving a summary of current knowledge on diet...)
I would consider that to be a normal diet, even today I know I don't each meat everyday. My mother told me her family on the farm in the 1950s only had meat once per week at the Sunday dinner, sometimes not. This was normal for this region people were not called vegetarians it was just a normal diet; meat was expensive and hard to store.
>drank ashes after training as a tonic.
I wonder if it was an ancient belief of gaining the power of the item you were consuming in this case a volcano similar to eating tiger or bear would give you their strength.
It has nothing to do with that. In Greece where I live, in the past ashes were used to filter water. Even today it’s used in pastries as in bakery because it helps in digestion and cleans the bowel from infections.
It has dozens of other uses, from cleaning dishes and pottery to fertilizer (that’s why some of the best wines are produced in places where used to be volcanoes). It can also drive insects like ants and roaches away, can be used in soaps, on open wounds to help disinfection, etc.
Edit: it appears Luxembourg has us beat (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visual...).
Source: http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html
So yeah if I want to have a higher body fat percentage, I guess I could do this.