Pliny Natural History, Vol. VI (Loeb Latin-English)

a cure. By the time of Pliny, however, the use of drugs was much more in favor with professional physicians, and very common indeed among the amateur doctors who treated themselves and their families when they fell sick. Sometimes modern medicine approves of the prescriptions given in the Natural History, but for the most part they are of little or no value, and occasionally even dangerous. Amulets and other charms, often mentioned, were evidently popular, but Pliny himself seems on the whole to be non-committal as to their efficacy, although he condemns magic in the first chapters of Book XXX.

This faith in drugs and charms may be, at least in part, due to the probable increased prevalence of malaria in the first century A.D. Ancient medicine was powerless against it, and its victims betook themselves to drugs, at the same time developing a timid inferiority complex with regard to the predisposing causes—chill, exposure, and fatigue. Among the Moralia of Plutarch is an essay on keeping well (de sanitate tuenda praecepta). It consists chiefly of rules for avoiding “fever” by abstaining from excess or strain of all kinds. In fact, it seems as though the old Greek cult of physical fitness and beauty—for there was a science of health as well as of healing—had been replaced by something very near to hypochondria.

There is at least one ingredient of the Plinian remedies that must have been of great value. Honey appears again and again in both potions and external applications, full use being made of its healing powers. The superseding of honey by sugar has been by no means an unmixed blessing.