/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>33989628
Well, to be fair, the specific example I used was fictitious. I made up the example I used based on the thousands of remedies I had read in the Natural history. There is a brief essay on Roman medicine at the end of the book, explaining how classicists reconcile Pliny's advocating so many dubious practices.

In essence, Roman medicine was based around the notion of popular, or folk, medicine rather than evidence-based medicine. Some of the Greeks, such as famed doctor Asclepiades, practiced evidence-based medicine. However, Pliny tore into Asclepiades' methodology, likely not an objection over his view of medicine so much as because Pliny was skeptical of the Greeks, seeing them as a bunch of prancing, lala sissy men as many Romans of the time did.

Some concepts common in Roman popular medicine were the ideas of magic numbers (chief among them three, seven and nine), the idea of "transferring" a disease to an animal through its mutilation (it was thought that the bodily complaint of the patient would depart with the animal's death), and the use of wine, honey, and hydromel as popular balms or drinks which were infused with substances supposedly possessing medicinal properties.

>>33995530
>Feed random shit to people; they get cured; they then tell their friends what Granny did to cure them, but get the details slightly wrong
Yep, precisely this. Nearly all of Pliny's remedies are folk remedies and superstitions obtained through his many, many authorities. Pliny himself even expresses distaste and suspicion of their efficacy, as he refers to whole books passively, where he would write something like "It is reported that..." or "It is said that..." instead of directly stating "This cures that."

One remedy which I found very entertaining though is his personal suggestion to wear a woman's breast band around the head to relieve headache. Picturing an obese, old Roman man constantly dictating every thought that comes to his mind to a scribe slave while wearing some poor slave girl's bra as a turban is pretty funny.