Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine | Page 4

by the same motives. However, Cato did a great deal of good by attempting to lessen the vice and luxury of his age.
The Greeks in Rome were looked at askance as foreign adventurers, and there is no doubt that although many were honourable men, others came to Rome merely to make money out of the superstitious beliefs and credulity of the Roman people. Fine clothes, a good house, and the giving of entertainments, were the best introduction to practice that some of these practitioners could devise.
The medical opinions of Cato throw a sidelight upon the state of medicine in his time. He attempted to cure dislocations by uttering a nonsensical incantation: "Huat hanat ista pista sista damiato damnaustra!" He considered ducks, geese and hares a light and suitable diet for the sick, and had no faith in fasting.
Although the darkness was prolonged and intense before the dawn of medical science in Rome, yet, in ancient times, there was a considerable amount of knowledge of sanitation. The great sewer of Rome, the Cloaca Maxima, which drained the swampy valley between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, was built by order of Tarquinius Priscus in 616 B.C. It is wonderful that at the present time the visitor may see this ancient work in the Roman Forum, and trace its course to the Tiber. In the Forum, too, to the left of the Temple of Castor, is the sacred district of Juturna, the nymph of the healing springs which well up at the base of the Palatine Hill. Lacus Juturn? is a four-sided basin with a pillar in the middle, on which rested a marble altar decorated with figures in relief. Beside the basin are rooms for religious purposes. These rooms are adorned with the gods of healing, ?sculapius with an acolyte holding a cock, the Dioscuri and their horses, the head of Serapis, and a headless statue of Apollo.
The Cloaca Maxima was formed of three tiers of arches, the vault within the innermost tier being 14 ft. in diameter. The administration of the sewers, in the time of the Republic, was in the hands of the censors, but special officers called curatores cloacarum were employed during the Empire, and the workmen who repaired and cleansed the sewers were condemned criminals. These ancient sewers, which have existed for twenty-five centuries, are monuments to the wisdom and power of the people who built them. In the time of Furius Camillus private drains were connected with the public sewers which were flushed by aqueduct and rain water. This system has prevailed throughout the centuries.
The Aqueducts were also marvellous works, and although they were added to in the time of the Empire, Sextus Julius Frontinus, curator of waters in the year A.D. 94, gives descriptions of the nine ancient aqueducts, some of which were constructed long before the Empire. For instance, the Aqua Appia was conducted into the city three hundred and twelve years before the advent of Christ, and was about seven miles long. The Aqua Anio Vetus, sixty-two miles in length, built in B.C. 144, was conveyed across the Campagna from a source in the country beyond Tivoli. Near this place there is a spring of milky-looking water containing sulphurous acid, sulphurated lime, and bicarbonate of lime, used now, and in ancient times for the relief of skin complaints. This water, at the present day, has an almost constant temperature of 75°.
In course of time, when the Roman power was being extended abroad, the pursuit of conquest left little scope for the cultivation of the peaceful arts and the investigation of science, and life itself was accounted so cheap that little thought was given to improving methods for the treatment of the sick and wounded. On a campaign every soldier carried on his person a field-dressing, and the wounded received rough-and-ready first-aid attention from their comrades in arms.
Later, when conquest was ended, and attention was given to the consolidation of the provinces, ease and happiness, as has been shown by Gibbon, tended to the decay of courage and thus to lessen the prowess of the Roman legions, but there was compensation for this state of affairs at the heart of the Empire because strong streams of capable and robust recruits flowed in from Spain, Gaul, Britain and Illyricum.
At its commencement, the Empire was in a peaceful, and, on the whole, prosperous condition, and the provincials, as well as the Romans, "acknowledged that the true principles of social life, laws, agriculture, and science, which had been first invented by the wisdom of Athens, were now firmly established by the power of Rome, under whose auspicious influence the fiercest barbarians were united by an equal government and common language. They affirm that with the improvement of arts the human species was visibly multiplied. They celebrate the increasing