Human Faeces, Roman Medicine
By Owain Williams
We often take modern medicine for granted. The ready availability of painkillers, penicillin, and all manner of proscription medicine makes life much safer and healthier. In antiquity, medicine more advanced than we might assume — the ancient Egyptians had scientific evaluations by the mid-third millennium BC, the Assyrians composed a medical encyclopedia, and the Romans had complex surgical techniques. However, there were many treatments in antiquity that we would find disgusting and wholly unsafe today.
The most obvious of such outdated treatments is the use of human excrement in medicines. While not a very common ingredient — it appears in just two per cent of medicinal recipes in the Hippocratic corpus — and some physicians appear to have dismissed its use entirely, it was persistently proscribed through the ancient Greco-Roman world, especially in popular medicine. Dioscorides includes 46 treatments using human and animal excrement in his On Medical Material, and Pliny the Elder notes nearly 100 different medicinal recipes using excrement, both human and animal, in Book 28 of his Natural History alone!
Now, in addition to the literary evidence, we have archaeological evidence for this practice! Analysis of organic material contained in a Roman glass ‘candlestick’ unguentarium from Pergamon — coincidentally, where Galen, the famous physician, was from — have found evidence of faecal matter, with strong indicators that it was human, along with aromatic compounds, especially thyme. There’s no doubt about it now, the Romans used medicines containing excrement, with strong-smelling herbs to mask the smell!
If you want to read more about how the Greeks and Romans used faeces in their medicine, check out W.V. Harris, ‘Scatological Asklepios: The Use of Excrement in Graeco-Roman Healthcare”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 75 (2020), 1–23.
