̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Hippocratic medicine

Ancient faeces reveal parasites described in earliest Greek medical texts

fpjl2 — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 04:15:11 +0000

Ancient faeces from prehistoric burials on the Greek island of Kea have provided the first archaeological evidence for the parasitic worms described 2,500 years ago in the writings of Hippocrates – the most influential works of classical medicine.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers Evilena Anastasiou and Piers Mitchell used microscopy to study soil formed from decomposed faeces recovered from the surface of pelvic bones of skeletons buried in the Neolithic (4th millennium BC), Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) and Roman periods (146 BC – 330 AD).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge team worked on this project with Anastasia Papathanasiou and Lynne Schepartz, who are experts in the archaeology and anthropology of ancient Greece, and were based in Athens.

They found that eggs from two species of parasitic worm (helminths) were present: whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), and roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides). Whipworm was present from the Neolithic, and roundworm from the Bronze Age.

Hippocrates was a medical practitioner from the Greek island of Cos, who lived in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. He became famous for developing the concept of humoural theory to explain why people became ill.

This theory – in which a healthy body has a balance of four ‘humours’: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm – remained the accepted explanation for disease followed by doctors in Europe until the 17th century, over 2,000 years later.

Hippocrates and his students described many diseases in their medical texts, and historians have been trying to work out which diseases they were. Until now, they had to rely on the original written descriptions of intestinal worms to estimate which parasites may have infected the ancient Greeks. ̽��ֱ��Hippocratic texts called these intestinal worms Helmins strongyle, Ascaris, and Helmins plateia.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that this new archaeological evidence identifies beyond doubt some of the species of parasites that infected people in the region. ̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

“ ̽��ֱ��Helmins strongyle worm in the ancient Greek texts is likely to have referred to roundworm, as found at Kea. ̽��ֱ��Ascaris worm described in the ancient medical texts may well have referred to two parasites, pinworm and whipworm, with the latter being found at Kea,” said study leader Piers Mitchell, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

“Until now we only had estimates from historians as to what kinds of parasites were described in the ancient Greek medical texts. Our research confirms some aspects of what the historians thought, but also adds new information that the historians did not expect, such as that whipworm was present”.

̽��ֱ��mention of infections by these parasites in the Hippocratic Corpus includes symptoms of vomiting up worms, diarrhoea, fevers and shivers, heartburn, weakness, and swelling of the abdomen.

Descriptions of treatment for intestinal worms in the Corpus were mainly through medicines, such as the crushed root of the wild herb seseli mixed with water and honey taken as a drink.

“Finding the eggs of intestinal parasites as early as the Neolithic period in Greece is a key advance in our field,” said Evilena Anastasiou, one of the study’s authors. “This provides the earliest evidence for parasitic worms in ancient Greece.”

“This research shows how we can bring together archaeology and history to help us better understand the discoveries of key early medical practitioners and scientists,” added Mitchell.

Earliest archaeological evidence of intestinal parasitic worms infecting the ancient inhabitants of Greece confirms descriptions found in writings associated with Hippocrates, the early physician and ‘father of Western medicine’.

This research shows how we can bring together archaeology and history to help us better understand the discoveries of key early medical practitioners and scientists

Piers Mitchell

Left: Piers Mitchell/Elsevier. Right: Department of Classics, ̽��ֱ�� of Cincinnati.

Left: whipworm egg taken from ancient Greek faecal matter. Right: excavation of the Bronze Age site of Ayia Irini on the island of Kea.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Food and medicine in classical Greece: the ‘blurred boundary’

bjb42 — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:00:12 +0000

̽��ֱ��Hippocratic Collection is our earliest written source for deciphering the history of Greek medicine. This collection of about 60 texts was written by several authors on a multitude of medical topics, and was preserved under the name of Hippocrates – the famous physician born around 460 BC who later became known as the ‘Father of Medicine’.

An important tenet of Hippocratic theory is the emphasis on dietetics. Broadly speaking, dietetics is the tailored application to individual needs of regimens encompassing all aspects of daily life. This is distinctive of Hippocratic medicine, not being found in earlier Greek texts or in medical documents from Mesopotamia and Egypt. Dietetic medicine has consequently attracted the attention of scholars, sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of Hippocratic medicine, especially pharmacology. However, Dr Laurence Totelin, a research fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, who studies ancient pharmacology, has come to the conclusion that the boundary between dietetics and pharmacology in ancient Greece was much more blurred than previously thought. In fact, Dr Totelin believes that dietetics, pharmacology and other ways of treating diseases in antiquity are part of an integrated system and should be studied as such.

̽��ֱ��‘boom’ in dietetic medicine in 5th-century Greece seemed to have led to reflections on what distinguished a ‘food’ from a ‘drug’. For instance, the author of the Hippocratic treatise Places in Man writes that:

‘All things that cause change in the present state [of the patient] are drugs, and all [substances] that are rather strong cause change. It is possible, if you want, to bring about change by means of a drug, or, if you do not want [to use a drug], by means of foods.’

Although the writer manages to define the notion of ‘drug’, he is not so successful at defining the notion of ‘food’, or the difference between a food and a drug. In many cases, this distinction must have been very blurred indeed.

As an example, silphium, an umbelliferous plant exported from the ancient Greek city of Cyrene and now thought to be extinct, was used both as an expensive way to enhance dishes and also to treat serious medical conditions. Authors writing on dietetics described silphium as a ‘windy’ plant, similar to garlic, leek or other ‘sharp’ herbs. Silphium was prescribed in gynaecology against ‘winds in the womb’ or to ‘create a wind in the womb’. Although ‘winds in the womb’ referred to a genuine condition, ‘to create a wind in the womb’ may have been a euphemistic way to refer to an abortion; another important use of the herb was indeed as an abortive. It seems that silphium was primarily exported from Libya as a culinary herb and that the medicinal uses of the plant stemmed from its uses in cooking.

With time, the definition of ‘drug’ as opposed to ‘food’ became clearer. ̽��ֱ��Aristotelian Problems (a 3rd-century BC collection of texts attributed to Aristotle) state that foods are ‘concocted’ and assimilated by the body, whereas drugs penetrate into the vessels, where they cause disturbances due to an excess of heat or cold.

However, in practice, the boundary between food and drug remained blurred throughout antiquity, with plants like myrrh, silphium, pomegranate, frankincense and cinnamon finding a place in both dietetic treatises and in texts devoted to drugs. This research highlights the historical importance of studying the interaction between dietetics and pharmacology in ancient medicine, and of examining how definitions of ‘foods’ and ‘drugs’ evolved from antiquity to the present day.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Laurence Totelin (lmvt2@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

What distinguishes a drug from food? Laurence Totelin traces the emergence of a definition in ancient Greece.

̽��ֱ��‘boom’ in dietetic medicine in 5th-century Greece seemed to have led to reflections on what distinguished a ‘food’ from a ‘drug’.

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Growing Olives

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