Corkey Trivia: Ancient Health Care Today
Imagine being so far ahead of your time that it would take around 2000 years for the rest of mankind to catch up to you. A Greek doctor named Galen was such a person.
In those days, people thought that the gods made you sick, so they would go to the temples and pray and rest, and if you were lucky the god of healing would appear to you in a dream and you would awaken healed. Though there is much to be said for prayer and rest, a reliable cure it is not.
In America, between 10 – 25% of the people in our country still rely on prayer and rest for a miraculous cure because they don’t have health insurance. That doesn’t even include the under-insured. For a good number of people in America, health care has not changed much in over 2000 years. In America, access to health care costs money. So, access to health care is for people who can afford to pay or have a job that pays for their health benefits. The rest of us do not. It was a similar situation in Rome.
In Rome, the “hoi palloi” didn’t understand about hygiene and disease, but Galen did. To put it in perspective, he was a doctor to the stars. He treated the superstars of the day: Gladiators, Olympic Athletes, politicians, and the ultra rich.
Galen started off as a sports doctor for Olympic athletes. He was extremely successful because he was the first to actually treat the cause of the problem rather than the symptom. He viewed the human body as a machine, and knew that a pain in your hand might be coming from your spine through his study of anatomy.
Human dissection was forbidden at the time, so he learned from animal dissection and the many injuries of his athletic patients. When he treated the gladiators of Rome, he was able to study dissected human anatomy since the gladiators were able to slice each other up, legally.
To help prevent infection, he would clean gladiator’s wounds with sponges soaked in wine, not for the feel good qualities of wine but for the antiseptic properties of wine. (After all, alcohol kills germs.) For broken bones and compound fractures, he would set the bones and wrap the limb in bandages soaked in egg whites, oil, and wine. In a couple of days, this bandage would harden much like the casts we use today.
He designed hospitals for the treatment of Roman soldiers. His hospitals had flushing toilets and baths. He knew that hygiene was important. Roman surgical tools looked very much like modern surgical tools. Fire pits in surgical theaters indicate that it is even possible that the Romans were practicing sterile surgery. His hospital also had wards. This way he could prevent cross infection between patients. It took over 1,500 years for us to relearn the importance of hygiene. In modern times, sterile surgery was not practiced until WW I.
Galen knew that a balanced diet was important, so Roman hospital kitchens probably served the world’s first hospital food. Of course, regardless of what the food tasted like, we know for sure that wine was the beverage of choice during meals. During meals, the feel good rather than the antiseptic quality of the wine was enjoyed.
So if you don’t have health insurance, you can eat healthy, wash your hands frequently, and pray that you don’t get hit by a Gladiator or a bus. And once you arrive home safely don’t forget to pour yourself a glass of wine with dinner. Galen would have approved. “To your health” and Cheers!
Tags: corkey trivia, galen, health care
