I am not asking for medical advice here. I want to know how a common medical condition was treated during 3 different historical time periods.
Let’s assume that I am a healthy 18-year old from a wealthy family which has the resources to pay for the best medical care possible at that time. I have recently had an acute Appendicitis attack and I seem to be getting worse by the day.
If we were talking about modern times there are tests that can be done to confirm the diagnosis, and surgical options to control the pain and ultimately remove my appendix safely, but that was not always the case.
I have picked 3 periods of time to see what would have been done if I had presented to a ‘medical professional’ with an appendicitis…
It’s the height of Greek Civilization and I live in Athens, Greece.
It’s the height of the Roman Empire and I live in Rome, Italy.
It’s the height of the Renaissance and I live in Florence, Italy.
Other than provide me with special herbs and potions, which would likely not do me much good, what else would have been done? If they performed surgery what were the chances I would have survived the inevitable infection?
You wouldn’t have survived the surgery in those times, so post op infections wouldn’t be a problem. Luckily it wouldn’t have been attempted since no one would know the cause of your symptoms.
So they would have given me some herbs and said ‘good luck’… My only chance being that my immune system is able to fight off the infection?
Considering they were performing Cesarean surgeries during the Roman Era (I think some of the mothers even survived) I would have thought that abdominal surgery would have at least been attempted by that time…
According to the Wiki article on Cesarean section “Caesarean section usually resulted in the death of the mother…”. Note that it says usually and not always.
Interesting article herethat discusses some evidence for women surviving caesarians in the Roman era. Otherwise the first recorded instance of a particular woman surviving was in the late 16th century. The article relies on evidence of successful caesarians on animals to bolster it’s argument.
The question - and admittedly I paraphrase “How would appendicitis have been treated…” - puts the cart before the horse. Appendicitis is a diagnosis. I think what you are really asking is how would the symptoms of appendicitis have been treated. the “classic” symptoms are abdominal pain, fever, and a few other things. So to clarify your question you might ask how would abdominal pain, fever and those other things have been treated.
However, while the classic symptoms are classic, they are not specific for appendicitis, not everyone has them, and atypical presentations occur often enough so that even in our enlightened and whiz bang times, the diagnosis of appendicitis is not necessarily a slam dunk. In fact, as an anatomic pathologist, I will contend that appendicitis CANNOT be definitively diagnosed unless and until the appendix is removed and examined. By a pathologist. (Surgeons are not the only ones who can wallow in an inflated sense of themselves!).
Removing the appendix, of course, is also the definitive treatment for appendicitis. Thus, appendicitis enjoys a distinction of being a condition that can only be fully diagnosed after it is fully treated.
None of this answers your questions, but it does further inflated my sense of self.
Thanks Oly. Another way to look at the question is whether there was a surgical treatment for appendicitis, or perhaps some non-surgical treatment, prior to the 1700 or 1800’s. I’ve read somewhere that medical treatment in ancient times while extremely primitive by our standards did help some people survive serious medical issues.
But I suspect that someone who suffered from appendicitis back then would have likely died no matter what was done since the best option possible, removing their Appendix, was still abdominal surgery and they didn’t understand germ theory yet.
You first hear in the renaissance about technical people chopping open dead bodies in a serious attempt to figure out how they worked. Before that, I assume it was philosophical meditation coupled with serendipidy; there were a lot of dead people, often split open, for the inquiring mind to look at if they chose… Plus what people guessed. I suppose too it was serendipidy that the brain is located right behind the eyes, so from ur Point of View, that’s where the personality seems obviously seated. But it does not appear from what I recall reading that the heart’s purpose and blood circulation was really known until about the 1600’s, for example.
What I’m getting at is that a person may suffer and then die of appendicitis, but other than the locality of the pain, there’s no indication what happened. Roman or Greek doctors were not in the habit (from what I recall reading) of chopping open the dead patients to autopsy and determine causes.
However, there are indications that a number of civilizations practiced surgery, including basics like open-head brain surgery… and indications (no cite offhand) that some survived this.
Neal Stephenson in his trilogy set in restoration Britain talks about surgery for stones in the bladder; again, my impression is that this knowledge of technique was a result of cadaver research around that time (or fantasy).
So the answer to the question was “would the ancients even know to cut and excise as a cure?” for appendicitis? Given the risk overall of infection before Lister, and given the risk of contaminating the open wound while chopping off the inflamed appendix, plus the risk of leaving an open bowel feeding into the abdomen, I would suggest that level of tech was nowhere near ready to do this sort of operation, even if they knew what they were looking for and had a plan to cure it. The results would likely always turn out badly.
Note that the phrasing in Wikipedia is utterly uninteresting without looking at what evidence there is. As TriPolar writes, and Wikipedia states, the first recorded instance of someone surviving is in the 16th century.
Wikipedia’s only cite supporting “usually” is the article TriPolar links to, which is based on the implied survival of the mother, animal or human, in Talmudic interpretation of religious laws about first born. Even if one accepts this interpretation as evidence that Jews of the Roman era considered surviving a caesarian common place, they skill they may have had at this doesn’t appear to have been shared with other cultures or passed on since medically competent Jewish scholars of later ages call that interpretation absurd. From the article it appears interpreting it as hypothetical was the common tradition.
I don’t think the article was at all conclusive, but it raises interesting questions. The references to caesarians on farm animals is an important aspect, farmers and butchers may have had a better idea of anatomy than the ‘doctors’ of the time. IIRC the 16th century caesarian was performed by a pig gelder. Given someone with the knowledge of where to cut and how to sew up the wound makes it more credible that there were some earlier survivors. Still speculation though.