Shitty Medicine

Excrement in Ancient Greek healthcare

Modern healthcare can be pretty shitty, but at least it typically doesn’t involve actual shit. Ancient Greek medicine was full of crap.

Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” himself, was a proponent of using excrement - but only to treat women. Despite his, and his followers’, huge body of work, the only instances of remedies containing dung come from his Diseases of Women treatise.

Hippocratic notions of anatomy were somewhat lacking, and he believed that many illnesses in women were caused by the uterus moving around within the body. In some cases, he thought, it could be chased back to its proper position by the use of bad smells. Thus, if the uterus were too low, a mixture of goat’s excrement, hare’s hair, and seal oil should be used as a fumigant from below - that is to say, the fumes were supposed to waft up the vagina and make the uterus retreat. Likewise, if the uterus were too high, the patient should sniff powdered cow excrement in vinegar, scaring it back down into place.

But dung wasn’t just used as something deliberately disgusting; it was also thought to have genuine medical properties. A fumigation of wolf excrement with ass’s hair and hulwort was used to help women fall pregnant. For excessive menstrual bleeding he suggests that burnt mule’s excrement should be ground finely and mixed with wine to help it go down.

And it wasn’t just one weird doctor and his students. A few hundred years later another Greek physician, Dioscorides, wrote of a great many more uses of dung, and he didn’t just stick to ‘women’s complaints’.

For the treatment of gout, Dioscorides recommends applying an ointment of the dung of a she-goat, the fat of a he-goat, and saffron - which is still weirdly gender-specific, if only in relation to the goats. The droppings of goats are also suggested, drunk in wine, to treat jaundice. Burnt and mixed with vinegar they could be smeared onto bald spots to encourage hair growth. Boiled with wine they could be applied to snake bites.

Many other animals make an appearance in Dioscorides' section on dung. For a scorpion sting he suggests drinking an infusion of dried donkey manure in wine. Pigeon droppings ground up in oil could be applied to burns. Kidney stones could be treated by mixing ground mouse droppings with frankincense, honey, and wine. The list goes on, with all sorts of maladies treated by the dung of various birds, mammals, and reptiles.

Another Greek medical text, of uncertain authorship, adds a few more crappy options: treat toothache with a mix of donkey dung and vinegar, and bring down swellings with old whitened dog dung ground up with honey.

But why did the ancient Greek doctors use so much poop? There are a few theories. One idea likens it to a placebo effect, in which the patient is supposed to think ‘The doctor wouldn’t give me something so gross unless it was really going to work!’ and thus, by the power of suggestion, it does really work. Another is that the disgusting substances were supposed to drive out the disease-causing demons from the patient’s body. However, we have no writings from the time to either confirm or deny these theories. Personally, I just think they really believed in the medicinal power of poop.