Army Medical Practices

[D B Campbell]

Doing research for my novel, I ran across an interesting and informative article on Accute pain management in the Roman army: [ http://www.apicareonline.com/acute-pain-...oman-army/ ]

This is a curious article. Having done a little research into Roman army medicine in the past, I was intrigued to see where all these new details had come from. So I followed up some of the references.

For example, the section on "Wound Care at Battlefield" is supposedly based on Dioscorides, De Medica Materia 4.63-64.3; 4.75.4. Not a source normally cited by Roman military writers. And I can see why. In these sections, Dioscorides describes various poppy seeds (ch. 63-64) and how mandragora/mandrake can promote sleep if used as a suppository (ch. 76.4 -- ch. 75 doesn't have a 4, so I'm guessing this is a misprint).

The section on "Non-Pharmacological Treatments" is supposedly based on Martialis, Medicinae 52,24 (not sure how to check this -- the standard Teubner edition is divided into 1.1-26, 2.1-28, and 3.1-38); Dioscorides, De Medica Materia 1.98-105 (all about resin and bitumen, unless it's Wellmann's renumbered version, in which case it's a lengthy sequence of plants that can be used for all sorts of stuff, including masking the smell of sweat); 4.9-11 (plants that are used for dysentery, menstrual discharge, inflammation, and hernias); 2.49-50 (rabies and afterbirth, unless it's Wellmann's renumbered version, in which case it's chicken soup and eggs); 2.27 (snake poisoining, or in Wellmann's edition, brine baths); and Galen, De Methodo Medendi 7.6 = Kühn pp. 475-494 (20 pages of Greek that I didn't fancy translating).

These are fascinating sources for evidence of folk cures, but I'm not sure what they tell us about the Roman army. And I would have expected better targeted citations, which are all a bit vague.