I know syphillis was many centuries down the iter but were there any other microbes or spirochetes those lucky bastards had to worry about or was pregnancy the only drawback to a libertine society?
Yes they most certainly did have STDs, two quick reference links:
http://www.archaeolink.com/roman_medicine.htm
http://www.racoon.com/hpv/HPV-most_common_STD.htm
Great links thanks! I Googled but got swamped with irrelevent stuff.
I must be misreading somehow, Improv Geek - I didn’t see any references to ancient STDs in those links.
You’re still right, of course. They must have had STDs. However, I have to admit, I can’t remember ever reading about one, and I’ve read a fair number of ancient medical texts. Also, nothing at all has come up in my book/article database searches. I’ll get back to you.
I know that there have been many suspected cases of syphillis, going back to biblical and ancient Rome -
Vivian Nutton’s survey Ancient Medicine (Routeledge, 2004) includes a chapter on patterns of disease in the ancient world. Her source material is mainly the individual “case-studies” present in the Hippocratic Epidemics plus inscriptions at temples devoted to Asclepius, bio-archaeology (medical examination of skeletal remains), and a few scraps from other literature (e.g. a lengthy description of the maladies of old age from Plato’s Timaeus). P. 325 includes some discussion of venereal disease and treatment:
In a footnote to that last point on Syphillis the author notes “The treponeme of syphilis is reported from the Hellenistic necropolis of Metapontum in S. Italy (Carter 1998:531-3) and from a fourth-century AD cemetery at Costebelle (S. France) (Palfi et al. 2000). But the remarkable spread of the infection in 1493 suggests that the population had not previously been exposed to venereal syphilis to any great extent.”
Vivian Nutton is actually male. I was shocked when I discovered that - by seeing him talk. I kept wondering when Vivian Nutton would get there!
Yikes, that is embarassing. Medicine is not a focus of mine in the ancient world, but I should at least be able to get the gender of an author right, even if I’m just skimming his book…
Nah, my whole ancient medicine class was deceived. We had spent all semester reading his articles, referring to him as ‘her’. Only next semester did we go see the talk. Oops!
Which is all to say, while there must have been some STDs in antiquity (and syphilis is very debatable - many people think that it primarily came over from the Americas), there wasn’t much attention given to them as a seperate class of disease. I suspect this is because a) they may have been less widespread - global travel has helped a lot in the spread of STDs, and b) without a solid biological basis for understanding transmission of disease, it’s harder to examine, classify, understand and write about them.