How fascinating. Has anyone tried to recreate it?? And did Marcus Aurelius have poor health before or after he started having daily doses of viper flesh and opium??
Love the history! What most forget about the ozempic of today, is that our blood sugar is changed by wireless radiation, which did not exist before 1850.
This is why diabetes is an electrical illness, and does not help to be tracked with iPhone blood sugar monitors:
As a matter of interest, the Ancients did indeed have access to soap, had they chosen to use it, which generally they didn’t. And of course Aspirin, being a synthetic extract of the bark of the willow tree, was also commonly used for the treatment of various ailments in the form of a tincture. (The chemistry is quite interesting in itself.)
Well attested too that in the Middle Ages physicians would pack wounds with spider webs and the green mould from old bread, so who knows…. maybe they had a better understanding of these things than we give them credit for.
Thank you for this fascinating article (and good title as well). I understood that Marcus Aurelius spent much of his life out in the field, and assumed that camping and being out in nature would have been healthy, much healthier than congested court life.
Am I the only one who scrolled through wondering how I could get my hands on some?
Only partly joking.
Haa haa! I thought the snake venom was a bit of a turn off...
I'll consider anything, depending on the day. Haha!
How fascinating. Has anyone tried to recreate it?? And did Marcus Aurelius have poor health before or after he started having daily doses of viper flesh and opium??
I believe he had poor health throughout his life... but I can't imagine the viper flesh helped...
No!!
Medications omg hahaha
Love the history! What most forget about the ozempic of today, is that our blood sugar is changed by wireless radiation, which did not exist before 1850.
This is why diabetes is an electrical illness, and does not help to be tracked with iPhone blood sugar monitors:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/p/diabetes
Thanks very much for sharing your writings.
As a matter of interest, the Ancients did indeed have access to soap, had they chosen to use it, which generally they didn’t. And of course Aspirin, being a synthetic extract of the bark of the willow tree, was also commonly used for the treatment of various ailments in the form of a tincture. (The chemistry is quite interesting in itself.)
Well attested too that in the Middle Ages physicians would pack wounds with spider webs and the green mould from old bread, so who knows…. maybe they had a better understanding of these things than we give them credit for.
Thank you for this fascinating article (and good title as well). I understood that Marcus Aurelius spent much of his life out in the field, and assumed that camping and being out in nature would have been healthy, much healthier than congested court life.