History of Herbs :: Rome
"Healing by Class"
At the height of its glory, the borders of the Roman Empire extended to the ends of the Mediterranean world. After the fall of Mesopotamian cultures, the Roman world included the valuable spice route to Asia and all ports that were open to the Far East. In order to protect one of their greatest sources of wealth, the emperor Nero sent legions to the Middle East. Traveling with the army as a physician was a man who would pioneer the field of medical botany.
Pendanius Dioscorides was a Greek man born in Turkey in 40 CE who traveled the world with the legions of Rome. On his travels through Italy, Germany, and the Middle East, he observed and documented 600 plants. His observations, as well as the folk remedies gathered from village wise persons, were compiled into De Materia Medica (On Medicine). As Europe’s first real herbal, it became required reading for every medical student and aspiring herbalist for the nest 1,500 years.
Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 CE) compiled Historia Naturalis (Natural History), a 37-volume work, of which 7 are concerned with botany and 7 additional volumes deal specifically with healing herbs. While some remedies he advised are questionable, others are still applicable today and his Natural History is still being printed.
Claudius Galenus (Galen) followed Pliny the Elder as Rome’s greatest physician. Born in Turkey, he had traveled to Greece and Egypt to study medicine with the greatest teachers in the Mediterranean. With such excellent credentials, he moved to Rome and became the court physician of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Where Hippocrates had been kind and tolerant, Galen was haughty and belligerent. He had no time or desire to deal with the peasant masses and even with his own upper class patients, he took a hands off approach. Instead of examining, he theorized. He did not feel that it was necessary to treat each case individually, if the symptoms were the same, the cause must be the same; therefore, the remedy was the same.
Galen’s remedies were complicated affairs; more often than not additional ingredients were added simply to please the egos of the royal class. If a preparation contained many exotic ingredients and cost a lot of money then it was exclusive to the upper class and was assumed work well. Galencials, as these complicated concoctions of plants, animal parts and mineral were called, remained popular in the royal houses of Europe for many centuries.
In the opinion of Pliny and Galen, the poor should be treated by one of their own class with simples, preparations made from only one material, rather than with galencials. The health of the lower class became the domain of folk healers and wise persons. The rhizotomoi, or rhizomists, who once sold their roots and rhizomes to Roman pharmacies, were deemed lower class and accused of mislabeling their products. Physicians were encouraged to grow their own plants, a practice that would continue and blossom into some of Europe’s most beautiful physic gardens.
Continue to History of Herbs :: Islam
For further reading:
Ian Dawson
History of Greek and Roman Medicine
© 2005
