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Doctor, or Undertaker?
Inside the Episode
With Jonathan Stamp
Poor Eirene. This week it was her turn to have the doctor call. And, as regular watchers of 'Rome' will know by now, that is never a good sign.
It would be putting it very mildly to say that medicine in ancient Rome was a hit-and-miss affair. More a miss-and-miss affair, with cure rates hovering somewhere between negligible and zero.
A complete lack of understanding, even among more experienced practitioners, of the causes of infection and the means to prevent it was the primary reason for this but by no means the only one. Another telling factor was that more or less anyone could set himself up as a doctor, and go directly into business.
We know from surviving papyrus records that the minimum length of apprenticeship for a weaver in Roman Egypt was 12 months. A notorious doctor called Thessalus of Thralles boasted that he could turn 'even the most ignorant slave' into a trained doctor in half that. Sometimes medical training involved no more than occasionally following another doctor on his rounds.
The Roman poet Martial parodied the result: "I felt a little ill and called Dr Symmachus. Well, you came Symmachus, and 100 students with you. Jabbed I was by a hundred freezing pairs of hands. I didn't have a fever Symmachus when I called you - but now I do".
This is quite light-hearted. Pliny the Elder gets more worked up. "Doctors earn gigantic fortunes, and all at their helpless patients' expense. Not only because it is they who pay their exorbitant fees but because they unwittingly provide the material on which the doctors experiment. More often than not the price the patients pay for those experiments is their life. The medical profession is the only one in which you can get away with murder – in fact be rewarded for it'.
Medicine was a Greek line of work. Romans availed themselves of it, but had no feel or respect for practicing it. Consequently they left it to Greeks living in Rome – more often than not freed Greek slaves – and doctors had little social standing as a result. Not that they cared. They turned their isolation to their advantage understanding, as Pliny in another passage puts it, that "People tend to trust advice about their own health less if they understand the language in which it is spoken".
And this was the respectable end of the profession. Greek doctors looked down on the herbalists and homeopaths that also plied their trade all over the city. They, the doctors argued, had not done their six months training. How could they hope to be taken seriously?
All in all the best medical advice to follow was simply not to get ill in the first place. Not easy in a cholera and malaria-ridden city of a million people, most of whom lived in filthy crowded conditions and earned their crust by hard, physical labor.
If you did get ill neither a Greek blood-leeching nor a Phoenician spell-spinner was likely to help you much. As Eirene and Pullo found out.
Martial again: "Until recently, Dialus, you were a doctor. Now you are an undertaker. And you say you've changed your job?"
Documentarian and historian Jonathan Stamp is a former Executive Producer in the BBC History Department and acted as Consultant and Co-Producer on Rome.
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Rome Logo Tee
An HBO SHOP(SM) exclusive features a soft cotton construction with the Rome logo across the front.
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Rome Fact
The population of Rome is estimated at its
height to have been over a million people, and that no other city was again as populous for another 1800 years.
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"A Necessary Fiction"
