That Bruise Looks Ugly: Re-Creating Roman Treatments to Remove Bruising
In my previous post I described how I tried (and failed) to make an adaptation of cerate used by Nero. It was made for a discussion of the chapter addressing bruises and swellings in the traveller’s medical guide referred to as the Medicina Plinii. It was not the only treatment that I recreated or tested for this discussion.
I had intended to re-create five others, but perhaps I was already feeling off, because despite the fact that I had bought the ingredients, I forgot to prepare the very first treatment outlined in the chapter. And I didn’t even realise before I started the discussion. It was a true Homer Simpson “d’oh” moment. Re-creating that treatment will be the focus of the third blog. I hope the radishes can last.
So this blog will consist of my reflections on the four treatments that I actually prepared, and perhaps some broader discussions.
Burnt Garlic and Honey
According to the Medicina Plinii 3.30.1 you can remove a recent bruise thus:
Burnt, ground garlic with honey.
That’s all it says. No amounts. No further details.
The Process
So I peeled half a bulb of garlic, cut some but left some cloves whole, and placed the garlic in a glazed ramekin. I then put it in an oven set at 240° C.
I didn’t set a timer.
I figured I’d be able to smell when it was burning.
Rookie error!
I love the smell of baking garlic. And Wednesday night I learnt two things:Burnt garlic doesn’t smell burnt.
Burnt garlic can stain glazed cookware. If you ever want to burn garlic (don’t laugh - I wanted to and you can never tell), maybe place it on some baking paper or parchment.
After two hours I thought I should check it. I was still in two minds about how burnt is “burnt”, so I went to the kitchen preparing to make a decision.
My decision was made for me when I found what I can only call “garlic à la Herculaneum.” That garlic wasn’t just burnt - it was carbonised.
 |
| So very, very burnt garlic. |
So I weighed out my Roman drachma’s weight (3.4 grams), and tried breaking it down with a fork. It broke apart easily, but this would not mash or easily crumble.
So I tried rubbing it against the side of the bowl with the back of spoons. I started with a teaspoon then changed to a dessert spoon in the hope the broader back would be more effective. Not appreciably. I ended up putting it in the garlic mincer in the hope it might push these near cremated cloves through the holes!
Nope.
Hey, but it did make the initial breakdown which was helpful. By this point I was thinking, just tip it in the mortar and pound it already! But I didn’t for two reasons:I always lose some of whatever I but in my granite mortar, and I’d already weighed it (I’m thinking of buying a metal one); and
Who says the person using this recipe has a mortar and pestle? When it comes to the author’s recommendations on what medical supplies you should have on hand when travelling, they never mention a mortar and pestle.
So I endured. Sure it wasn’t as finely ground as the frankincense I used the day before, but it would do.
So now I had to mix it with honey.
Now a note on honey: humans have finally figured out how to adulterate honey, so instead of using supermarket honey I wanted to use something made by smaller producers. Now my brother is a honey connoisseur. He’s the only person I know who returns from trips with honey (even from Greece). As a result, I did not want to nick any of his difficult to replace stuff. That counted out the Norfolk and Tasmania stuff (the Greek stuff was long ago eaten). There was a bottle I bought him from a small local producer, but it was yellow box (not exactly a Mediterranean tree), and unopened. That left the Coonowrin honey from the Sunshine Coast which could be replaced. But it was candied beyond belief.
 |
| Candied Coonowrin Honey |
That was a partial blessing as I could scoop out a spoonful. What I didn’t expect was how much a scooped teaspoonful would weigh. That’s how I ended up deciding on using 6 drachmas (20.4 grams) of honey; I just needed to remove a little.
I placed the honey in the bowl and placed it over heat à la my previously MacGyvered bain-marie to return it to its proper liquid form. I stirred it through and ended up with a mass which was holding its form. This was not dripping off, I had to use the back of another spoon to empty the first spoon’s bowl. It was also kind of a congealed mass in the tin. I was left with the impression that I was trying to manipulate a fine grade road surface asphalt.
 |
| Trying to heat the honey to allow it to mix through. |
I also had difficulty scraping my bowl clean.
 |
| Trying to scrape my bowl clean. Note that the mixture was not immediately filling the bottom of the tin to the bottom right. |
So, imagine my surprise when I opened the tin Thursday and the garlic and honey had loosened and filled the bottom of the tin. You can see this in the last photograph. I hadn’t expected that at all.
The students all agreed that while it looked unappealing, it smelled perfectly pleasant. No one insisted on trying any remedies, but jokes were made that I ought to have let them know I wanted them to come in beaten up. Given University safety policies, I’m glad no one insisted on trying it out.
The Ancient Medical Logic
I think the idea behind this remedy is shared by the thapsia cerate I discussed in the previous blog: the use of rubefacient to increase blood flow. Garlic can act as a rubefacient if used diluted and carefully, but isn’t suggested at all by doctors, because they are the ones who get to clean up the mess. These aren’t the only rubefacients in the text. Radish is also deemed a mild rubefacient.
It also provides a mustard remedy. The idea of using mustard to increase blood flow to an area is something that was used in my own childhood.
A Slight Milnsian Tangent*
When my brother was a baby my father oversaw my mother create what he called a “mustard poultice.” I was 12 or 13 at the time and watched with interest. Keen’s mustard powder was mixed into a paste with olive oil, placed on a rag, folded over, and pinned around my less-than-one-year-old baby brother’s neck to help his sore throat. I asked how it was supposed to work and Dad said it would attract blood to the site it was tied to and thus increase healing. It was perfectly logical. My baby brother’s throat was sore, blood promotes healing. I seriously doubt it could work through one layer of cotton rag pinned loosely, but I would love to hear people thoughts and insights.
At the time my family was very meat and three veg, and this was the only reason we had olive oil in the house. My father’s family was predominantly of Irish background with a sprinkle of English. This makes me wonder whether he got this from his Aunt Molly who worked in a Greek restaurant in Sydney at one time, and she might have learned it then. I will never know.
Looking back (and unable to ask further questions from either of them) I know a poultice is meant to be applied to the skin. I don’t know whether he was told the procedure incorrectly or whether he decided putting mustard on a baby is insane and he interpreted the recipe in what I thought was more logical. Again - I will never know.
This is just another real-life example of how traditional medical recipes can evolve over time, because no matter what, it was called a poultice and therefore had to have been topically applied.
Back on Track
Raw garlic can create chemical burns (here’s a paper discussing self-inflicted garlic burns when using traditional medicine - the pictures look painful). The cause of these burns is a compound called allicin, which gives raw garlic its burning sensation just to eat. Cooking garlic breaks down the allicin compounds. With this scientific knowledge (thanks to the Tasteful Science blog), I now wonder whether we are meant to lightly overcook the garlic, rather than carbonise it like I did. But again, users of this manual can only use what they are told. Maybe there is some assumed knowledge that a modern reader can again, never know.
The honey would help it stick to the site and its potential antibiotic properties might help in the treatment (to prevention? I don’t know) of an accidental garlic burn.
Apium and Egg-White
According to the Medicina Plinii another way to remove a recent bruise was:
Ground fresh apium with egg white.
I did not translate apium because it can mean two different plants: parsley or celery. Its name refers to bees (apis), as people considered bees to be particularly attracted to it. Celery and parsley are both members of the Apiaciae family, and in Greek, one of the names for parsley literally meant “rock celery”.
This treatment is different to the rubefacient-based treatments I have thus far discussed because it isn’t a rubefacient. There is a chance this might be a copying error from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, (20.44.115) which says:
It [apium] restores black and blue spots to natural colour, if they are fomented with a decoction of its seed. Smeared with egg white or cooked in a drink with water, it is good for kidneys.
The author of the Medicina Plinii does sometimes try to simplify directions, and if this is another example it led to the blending of two treatments for difference problems. That said, Pliny never described the apium as ground, so this might be a different treatment altogether.
The Process
So I started my re-creation of this by harvesting some of my parsley. My choice to use parsley was based purely on its availability. I removed all stems and roughly chopped it before placing it in my mortar and pestle to grind it. I then removed a small amount to show how this looked without the egg-white.
 |
| Ground parsley |
I did not seek to use precise amounts with this because I knew there was no way to be precise about the amount of egg-white. It worked out that I had 8.6 grams of ground parsley left. I added the smallest amount of egg-white I could manage and stirred it into the parsley. That amount must have been around 8.5 grams because I ended up with 17.1 grams of the mix.
 |
| The ground parsley with the egg-white mixed through it |
 |
| How the parsley and egg-white looked when first placed in the tin |
So took this to uni that night and made two discoveries:
- The ground parsley and egg-white had separated; and
- That the tins I’d used to contain these were not actually water-tight, or more to the point “egg-white-tight”, and some had spilled into my box. Yuck.
 |
| Separated parsley and egg-white. |
Once more, no-one offered to smear this on themselves, and we all agreed it kind of resembled Pop-Eye’s spinach in colour and texture, so long as you ignored the egg that had leeched out.
Ancient Medical Logic
I think there is a chance that this treatment was meant to work as a cooling approach to bruising rather than heating.
This is also likely the logic behind the use of holus in the treatment immediately preceding this one.
Raw ground holus by itself.
Holus is another word with a couple of definitions in this sense:
- any vegetable as shown through the use of it in a text written a little after the Medicina Plinii, “Medicines from Vegetables and Fruits” Medicinae ex Oleribus et Pomis by Gargilius Martialis; or
- Cabbage.
The Medicina Plinii got this treatment from Pliny the Elder (20.34.88), who got it from Cato (On Agriculture, 157.4), who both explicitly say this was cabbage brassica. A modern study has shown that cabbage leaves work as well as cold packs on osteo-arthritis, so there seems to be some validity to this logic.
So if we regard the use of apium and egg-white as working in a similar manner to cabbage, I would suggest that you needed to apply it immediately upon mixing it, and that the egg-white helps it adhere.
I also wonder if it were meant to adhere a little like modern facial mask. My mother had an egg-white facial mask when I was a child that she mourned the loss of when it went out of production and she used here last. I never thought to apply a little when I made it to my arm, probably because I have only just thought of this. Oh well.
Bread and Honey
The next treatment I re-created was from Medicina Plinii 3.30.3:
Strikes to the face or removed skin are healed by bread with honey.
I used the same honey I used for the garlic treatment above, heated to remove its crystallised form. For the bread I used a wholemeal roll from my favourite Vietnamese hot bread shop rather than a slice from a supermarket loaf. I figured this would have fewer preservatives and be more similar chemically to ancient bread. It also meant I got to eat the leftover roll with honey, which I enjoyed very much!
No, I was not going to try bake a Roman style loaf for my experiment. I can’t bake a modern loaf, Im not trying to bake in the ancient style.
I prepared two variations of this treatment: little pieces of bread soaked in honey, and a slice of bread spread with honey.
 |
| Left: slice of bread with honey; Right: small pieces of bread with honey stirred through |
When the students looked at the two options, they agreed with me that the slice would be far easier to apply to the face, and thus the more likely preparations. That said, I cannot remove the image from my mind of Gordon Ramsey calling some ancient Roman traveller “an idiot sandwich.”
Ancient Medical Logic
I am unsure of how this was thought to help. On the issue of this helping bruising, another treatment in the last section in the chapter (Medicina Plinii 3.30.15) might help:
If blood suffused, the dust of finely ground grain is combined with water and it has so much power that it even draws blood into bandages.
Bread is made from grain, maybe the honey was meant to hold it in place while the flour did its job? Now I must say I do not know if it is possible for blood to be drawn through the skin (google couldn’t help me), but it sounds improbable to me. That stated, my opinion does not matter - I’m not an ancient Roman.
On the issue of treating grazes, honey would be helpful. To quote one modern scientific study:
The healing property of honey is due to the fact that it offers antibacterial activity, maintains a moist wound condition, and its high viscosity helps to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection.
As for why you needed the bread for the graze, I have no idea. Given that this was to treat both facial grazes and assumed bruises caused by a strike to the face, maybe it was a combined treatment for a combination of complaints.
Salt Heating Pads
Salt is poured into a linen bag, then, having been dipped into boiling water and thus warmed, it is repeatedly applied. A sponge frequently applied with hot salted water removes a recent bruise caused by a blow Medicina Plinii 3.30.6.
I am unsure as to whether my next re-creation was meant to treat swelling which was named in the preceding section, or a recent bruise which is the immediately following treatment.
My re-creation sought to address two questions:
- What kind of salt was probably used?
- How well did the salt maintain its mass given multiple plunging into boiling water?
I didn’t have linen bags, but I had small calico bags left over from my niece’s wedding. I filled one with bog-standard fine ground table salt and the other with sea salt flakes. The table salt had been left over from an art project in the late ‘90s, so I was happy to use it up a bit more.
 |
| My two calico bags of salt. Left: table salt. Right: sea salt flakes |
Test One: Sea Salt Flakes
Once I had water boiling in a pot, I first dipped the sea salt flake bag. Despite my attempts to shake off the hot water drips, I found that the bag continued to drip very hot water onto my test site (aka my forearm).
Rather than give myself burns (I’m not that stupid), I continued to dunk the bag in the boiling water a couple of more times. I was leaving evaporated salt-stains all over my stove top, but the mass had not significantly decreased.
Test Two: Fine, Ground Table Salt
It was much easier to get the streaming water from the dip into hot water to stop. I imagine that this was because there were no large gaps between salt crystals for the water to try hold on.
Immediately applied to the test site it was uncomfortably hot, but that ceased rather quickly.
I dunked the bag another two times, and like the flakes, salt-stains gathered but the mass was still significantly large.
Reflections
I think this was a direction for a simple hot pack using fine salt, not flakes.
I imagine the use of linen as directed instead of calico might make a difference. I base this on my own linen being a thicker weave so maybe it would insulate against that first hot sensation? I would have to sew up some linen bags to know for sure, but I also recognise that linen cloths come in a variety of thicknesses. Perhaps the direction to use linen was simply to ensure that woollen cloth was not used?
There is another variable to also consider: water does not boil at the same temperature everywhere. What was a hot boil for me might be cooler elsewhere. This means that it was expected that people would adjust the application to their personal needs.
The reason why I am describing this as a “hot pack” is because its feel when wet reminds me of the hot packs made from wheat in bags my physiotherapist uses in me.
Used sensibly and with a sense of self preservation, this makes a good heat pack that I guess could have its size adapted as needed. It keeps its heat for a short while, but needs reheating periodically. And that reheating does not diminish its contents in a noticeable manner for a while.
 |
| Everything that I had prepared to take to the discussion. Note the salt bags. They aren't quite as full, and it is even easier to discern the table salt (left) from the salt flakes (right). See also how the honey and burnt garlic (tin to the most right), has now filled the entire bottom of the tin. |
Conclusions
The treatments I tried to re-create were variously successful. If I had decided to research the ingredients prior, such as garlic, I might have ended up with different conclusions. But doing that would have undermined the experiment. I was trying to re-create these like an ancient reader, not a modern scholar.
All four treatments could be made relatively easily, and all four were open to interpretation and showed me different things:
- I found out that the garlic and honey could be helpful, but I completely messed it up.
- The apium and egg-white was made successfully but did not hold together as I imagined.
- The honey and bread experiments showed that a single slice of bread was likely used rather than crumpled bread, at least following Occam razor.
- The salt hot pack experiment showed which was the best way to make it, and showed that you should adapt the heat to your safety needs.
I also found it interesting that the Medicina Plinii is promoting two different approaches to dispersing bruises: the use of chemical rubefacients (garlic, radish, mustard, and thapsia which I discussed in the previous blog), as well as cooling applications (apium and egg-white, and cabbage).
I found re-creating these treatments and then researching them extremely informative; it combined to help me understand the users of the Medicina Plinii better, and understand the logic, and sometimes proven science, behind some of these remedies.
I would also like to point out how this chapter on bruisings and swellings are placed within the third book of the Medicina Plinii. It is placed among the chapters devoted to looking good; warts, pimples, minor skin conditions, and hair-removers. It is immediately followed by a very short chapter on paralytics, but thematically would fit better earlier, perhaps among the epileptics, phrenetics, and those suffering lethargy. So I strongly believe that the majority of the material in this chapter was written to make people (and I would say men, given the lack of gynaecological medicine) look better. There are a few references to dislocations, but that is not the title.
Let me conclude that I do not recommend the use of any of these remedies. If you do, you could end up a statistic in a medical paper with a photograph of some part of your body illustrating what can potentially go wrong.
*Milnsian Tangent
This term was coined by one of my undergraduate peers in one of beloved Professor Bob Milns’ lectures. Often he would think of something associated tangentially to the topic as he was lecturing. He would announce he was going on a tangent, and then would typically hit us with something either immensely thoughtful, profound, or perhaps bordering on just awful.
My favourite Milnsian tangent falls into this last category and I will share because while it’s awful, I love it: is French red wine so good because of all the Gauls Julius Caesar killed around what was to become the famed vineyards? He figured the blood and bone couldn’t have hurt.
After the term was coined, anyone within the friend group would come to announce that they were engaging in a Milnsian Tangent when about to shift the topic of discussion in this manner. The term is used in my household, and I hope it lives on with others.
Comments
Post a Comment