Health in Ancient Rome: Longevity, Ideas, Issues | Early European History And Religion

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LIFESPAN AND HEALTH IN ANCIENT ROME

People in ancient Rome lived an average 22 years. The average height of an ancient Roman man was only five feet two inches. The analysis a 45 year old man at Herculaneum showed him to be undernourished, overworked and in continual pain as a result of his rotting teeth and fused discs in his spine.

In ancient Rome children were not considered human until they could walk and talk. It is has been calculated that 28 percent of all children died before reaching the age of 12 months. Some sociologist have suggested that parents didn't start having deep affection for their children until the beginning of industrialization in 18th century when infant mortality rates became low enough that parents could afford to form deep bonds with their children and not worry about them dying.

There are some indications that this may have been true in ancient Rome. Only 1.3 percent of all burials for infants have tombstones. But that doesn't mean they didn't express joy when a child war born. One birth announcement carved on a residential neighborhood read: “Cornelius Sabinus has been born." Another read, “Iuvenilla is born on Saturday the 2nd of August in the second hour of the evening." Next to it was a charcoal sketch of a newborn.

Studies have shown that providing clean water and sanitation can bring about tremendous benefits. People live longer, stay healthier and become productive while health care costs go down. People have realized the importance of clean water for some time. A tomb from ancient Egypt dated to 1450 B.C. depicts an elaborate filtering system. The ancient Greeks and especially the Romans devoted a lot of energy and resources to clean water.

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

Wellness, Exercise and Disfigurement in Ancient Rome

Jarrett A. Lobell wrote in Archaeology magazine: One of antiquity’s most prolific writers on the subject of health and wellness was the second-century A.D. physician, surgeon, and philosopher Galen. He saw health not just as lack of disease, but as a state that could be achieved by living a balanced life, an important component of which was moderate exercise. For the ancient Greeks, exercise meant competition, often in organized festivals such as the Olympics — the word “athlete” comes from the ancient Greek athlos, meaning contest. Participation in these events was limited to young men of certain classes. [Source Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology magazine, September/October 2021]

Exercise was also a crucial part of preparation for Greek military service, and thus women were excluded. But in the Roman world, exercise was more universally popular, and both men and women were frequent participants. Romans often exercised at the public baths, where both sexes and most social classes regularly gathered, says classicist Nigel Crowther of Western University. Men might play ball, run, wrestle, box, or lift weights. Women swam, played a hoop-rolling game called trochus, and especially favored ball games. “Galen suggests that ball games were good training for the fitness of both body and mind,” Crowther says.

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: As Christian Laes has shown in his book “Disabilities in Roman Antiquity”, bodily disfigurement of one kind or another was almost the norm in the ancient world. Broken arms and legs would not have been set properly and would have caused limps and physical difficulties for the remainder of a person’s life; scars received in war, in childhood, or in domestic and professional accidents would rarely have been stitched. People performed manual work were especially susceptible to hand and eye injuries. While blacksmiths wore eye patches to protect at least one eye while they worked, there was very little protective equipment available to the non-soldier and even less proficient medical care for the injured. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, March 10, 2018]

Ancient Roman Health Customs — Yawns and Dreams

four humors

Ancient Romans wore amulets to ward off disease and offered votives at temples to gods believed to have healing powers. The key to good health was thought to be keeping the four ‘humors’ in balance. Romans believed that yawning expelled life forces. People were taught to cover their mouths not out politeness but rather to keep the life force from leaving their bodies.

Roman believed a sneeze was an indication of the expulsion of a person's disease and every effort was made to make them sneeze. Sneezing was stopped by kissing the nose of a mule. The saying "God Bless you" has ancient origins. During the Roman Plague of 590, it was to those who sneezed out of fear it was an early sign that they had the plague.

According to History.com: Many ancient Roman physicians took dreams into consideration when making diagnoses and determining treatments because they believed they could be signals from the soul about humoral imbalances in the body. Doctors believed dreams could provide insights about patients that were hidden from direct observation. “Whatever the ill see and seem to do in dreams often will indicate to us lack and excess and quality of humors,” Galen wrote. For instance, dreams that included snow or ice were thought to indicate an excess of phlegm (a humor considered cold and wet), while those that featured fire signaled elevated levels of bile (a humor considered hot and dry). Galen diagnosed a wrestler who dreamed of struggling to breathe while standing in a cistern of blood as suffering from an excess of the humor, so he prescribed bloodletting as the treatment.

Ancient Ideas About Ejaculation and Digestion

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Ancient thought held that certain conditions — sluggishness, for example — were caused by an excess of phlegm in the body. The congestion could be relieved by ejaculating; Aristotle actually calls semen “the secretion of an excrement.” Simultaneously, semen was believed to be the purest form of blood, which contained, naturally, the very essence of life. In this way the male orgasm was not just a prerequisite for procreation, but could also regulate the temperature and the disposition of the body; it kept a person in balance. I say person because many ancient medics believed in a “two seed” model of procreation in which both men and women ejaculated and contributed “seed” to the generative mix. The second-century CE doctor Galen even thought he had discovered female seed when he observed fluid in the horns of the uterus (the fallopian tubes, to you and me). [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, September 23, 2017]

Claire Bubb, a medical historian at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, told that most ancient theories of digestion relied on the concept of heat and the individual capacity to produce it. “Aristotle, in whose theories heat plays a critical role in general, leans particularly hard into this correlation. Heat for him is unambiguously what turns ingested food into nourishment suitable for the body. Further, he believes that the degree of heat is variable in different individuals, but that some are closer to perfect than others.”[Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, June 1, 2019]

four humors: Flegmat (phlegm), Sanguin (blood), Coleric (yellow bile) and Melanc (black bile), divided between the male and female sexes, depicted here in a 16th-century German illustration

Because digestion is so individual, Bubb said, “It would not be hard for someone working within the Aristotelian tradition to take this claim to the next level and argue that a person with the most perfect degree of heat would be capable of most perfectly digesting his foods.” For anyone who subscribed to this system of thought the claim that Jesus never digested food wasn’t a denial of his humanity; it was an endorsement of his perfect body.

At the same time, not everyone agreed. Some people, Bubb said, thought that digestion was about crushing and grinding, not heat. The Roman era doctor Galen argued that “the quantity of waste products [depends on] the nature of foods consumed.” For Galen “radishes… are barely food at all and most of their substance is simply not suitable for assimilation, with the result that almost as much as is consumed must be excreted. Even a perfectly constructed body could not avoid this.” So you can see why other Christians would have disagreed with Valentinus and Epiphanius about the issue of excrement.

Of course modern theories of digestion are more Galenic than Aristotelian. If you want to say that Jesus was truly human, you have to admit that he used the bathroom. For the pragmatically minded there’s the issue of nutrition: Jesus lived on a high-fibre ancient Mediterranean diet; we have to imagine that life-long constipation was the least of his problems. Though Epiphanius doesn’t mention them, there were ancient Greeks who were also rumoured never to have gone to the bathroom. Dunderberg mentioned that two philosophers discussed in the ancient compilation Lives of the Philosophers never excreted solid waste either.

Gladiator Blood and Skin Used to Make Medicines and Cosmetics

Romans believed that the blood of a slain gladiator could cure epilepsy. In some cases, after a gladiator was killed and his body removed from the arena, the blood was quickly collected and sold still-warm by vendors. After gladiatorial combat was outlawed around A.D. 400, people began using the blood of executed criminals for the same cure. [Source: Andrew Handley, Listverse, February 8, 2013]

Mark Oliver wrote for Listverse: “Several Roman authors report people gathering the blood of dead gladiators and selling it as a medicine. The Romans apparently believed that gladiator blood had the power to cure epilepsy and would drink it as a cure. And that was just the civilized approach—others would pull out the gladiators’ livers and eat them raw. [Source: Mark Oliver, Listverse, August 23, 2016 ]

“This was so popular that when Rome banned gladiatorial combat, people kept the treatment going by drinking the blood of decapitated prisoners. Strangely, some Roman physicians actually report that this treatment worked. They claim to have seen people who drank human blood recover from their epileptic fits.

“The gladiators who lost became medicine for epileptics while the winners became aphrodisiacs. In Roman times, soap was hard to come by, so athletes cleaned themselves by covering their bodies in oil and scraping the dead skin cells off with a tool called a strigil. “Usually, the dead skin cells were just discarded—but not if you were a gladiator. Their sweat and skin scrapings were put into a bottle and sold to women as an aphrodisiac. Often, this was worked into a facial cream. Women would rub the cream all over their faces, hoping the dead skin cells of a gladiator would make them irresistible to men.”

Lead Poisoning in Ancient Rome

lead pipe at a Roman bath

Lead poisoning has been blamed on Rome's high rates of sterility, miscarriages and stillbirths. In 400 B.C. the Greek physician Hippocrates described a severe case of “colic” in a lead miner, The Roman engineer Vitruvius noted that men who worked in lead smelters had alarmingly pale complexions.

A study by Dr. Arthur Aufderheide of the University of Minnesota published in the International Journal Anthropology in 1992 revealed that Romans had 10 more times lead in their bones than modern Americans. Aufderheide decided to look into lead ingestion after learning that some historians attribute the madness of Caligula to poisoning from lead water pipes and wine additives.

Romans used it to make water pipes, underground pipes, jars and pewter tableware. It was added to coins and paint and was used to make cisterns and roofing. The Romans even cooked in leaden pots and used as kohl (blackened lead) eye-liner, skin-bleaching aides and cosmetics. This meant their food, their water and the things they placed on their body all contained high levels of lead.

Lead smelters in the Roman Empire produced an estimated 90,000 tons of lead ingots a year. Those in Spain, Britain and southern France were especially active. At the smelters an ore called galena was heated up to remove the lead and lead was remelted to extract silver. Pliny wrote that workers needed to cover their faces “otherwise the noxious and deadly vapor of the lead furnace is inhaled.”

Gum Disease and Tooth Decay in Roman-Era Britain

In Roman times. men lost an average of 6.6 teeth before they died, compared to 2.2 teeth 30,000 years ago and 3.5 teeth in 6,500 B.C. However, contrary to what you might think, Roman-era Britons had less gum disease than their 21st-century conterparts Tom Whipple wrote in the Sunday Times: “An analysis of the skulls of more than 300 Roman Britons has found a significantly lower rate of periodontitis, a common form of gum disease, than exists in today’s population. Among those examined – who were originally buried in a site in Poundbury, Dorset – between 5 per cent and 10 per cent had the disease, compared with 15 per cent to 30 per cent today. [Source: Tom Whipple, Sunday Times, October 2014 -]

“However, they also had considerably more evidence of abrasion on their teeth, probably a result of the diet of coarse grains that was common. The work involved looking at the sockets holding the teeth into the jaw. “Because gum disease causes disruption of the bone around the teeth, we are able to measure it,” said Francis Hughes, professor of periodontology at King’s college London. “He and his colleagues learnt that the Natural History Museum had a large collection of skeletons from the Poundbury burial site, and asked to analyse them. “To a lot of people’s surprise they had quite a lot less periodontitis than the modern human population. It was about a third as common as today,” Professor Hughes said. Some of the explanation for this does not exactly provide cause for envy: the Ancient Britons managed to contract even more serious diseases first, and died of those instead of suffering through old age with bad teeth. -

copy of a Roman denture

“The most common age at death appeared to be in the 40’s. The reason for the modern mouth to be unhealthier than it was centuries ago is probably a result of two things – diabetes and smoking. “Those two change the risk enormously,” Professor Hughes said. Periodontitis starts as gingivitis, a consequence of poor brushing that often manifests as bleeding and inflamed gums. This response is actually a protective mechanism. “It’s the body trying to fight the bacteria off. In smoking and diabetes that protective mechanism is decreased – the body is less able to fight,” Professor Hughes said. Starting with bleeding, the disease progresses through receding gums, looseness of teeth and eventually total tooth loss. With a life free not just from smoking and diabetes but also from refined sugar, the Poundbury teeth were similarly less affected by cavities. -

“Nevertheless, the research, published in the British Dental Journal, did not find that the oral hygiene of Ancient Britons was entirely something to be aspired to. “Decay was not widespread like it might be today,” Professor Hughes said. “But it was still there, probably a consequence of the starchy cereals they ate. Over the years that increased bacterial growth” Where decay did exist, it went unchecked. Some teeth had decayed to the point where they had infected the nerve, while others caused holes down to the jaw itself. “The amount of chronic infection must have caused a lot of misery,” Professor Hughes said. His profession would have been in demand even in that day and age, he added. “It’s still a rather good advert for dentists.” -

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except the bones from Archaeology of Bulgaria

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024