Ancient Romans seeking relief from epileptic seizures sometimes turned to the blood of gladiators. Pliny the Elder describes sufferers drinking it from a wounded fighter, hoping the treatment would stop their attacks. Other ancient prescriptions called for crushed snails on wounds, goat liver for poor night vision and mouse droppings rubbed on the abdomen to treat urinary stones. The examples come from different centuries and kinds of writing. Some prescriptions were recommended, others merely recorded, and some condemned outright. None should be mistaken for a standard treatment used by all Roman physicians.
Medicine in the Roman world drew on several traditions at once. During the first centuries BCE and CE, doctors familiar with Greek medical theory worked alongside midwives, household carers, drug sellers and religious healers. Many people also tried to treat themselves. Physicians could describe symptoms accurately or carry out demanding surgery while explaining illness through ideas about the body that are now known to be wrong. They used plants and minerals, some with physiological effects, alongside animal products whose supposed powers rested on tradition, resemblance or the patient’s hope of recovery.
The surviving reports need to be read according to what each author was trying to do. An encyclopaedist could list a prescription without recommending it. A poet could make an outrageous claim for the sake of a joke. And the appearance of a remedy in a book tells us little about how many patients ever tried it. Disagreement over those remedies was part of ancient medicine itself.
1. Gladiator Blood as a Treatment for Epilepsy
Gladiator blood appears in the writings of more than one Roman author. Writing in the first century CE, Pliny the Elder said that people afflicted with epilepsy drank blood from gladiators’ wounds while it was warm. He found the practice repellent, comparing it unfavourably with the behaviour of wild animals, rather than praising it as a cure. Epilepsy was called the ‘falling sickness’ and also the ‘comitial disease’, because an attack could interrupt a public assembly. Without knowledge of electrical activity in the brain, sudden loss of consciousness, convulsions and collapse could appear particularly alarming.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, another Roman encyclopaedist, also knew of the treatment. In Book 3, chapter 23 of his medical work, he first discusses seizures and such measures as dietary changes and purging. He then reports that some patients claimed recovery after swallowing blood taken from a gladiator who had been killed. Celsus calls the remedy miserable, although he recognises why someone suffering badly might attempt it. His discussion and Pliny’s Natural History 28.2 record the belief without endorsing it as treatment. Both authors express reservations about the practice.
The attraction of a gladiator’s blood may have been connected to the fighter’s reputation for bodily strength, endurance and violent death. One possible explanation is that patients hoped to acquire some of his vitality by drinking it, as though it could overcome the force causing their seizures. That motive is an interpretation, however, rather than something every ancient writer expressly attributes to patients. Literary references establish that the remedy was known, but cannot tell us how often blood was collected or whether crowds regularly approached the arena after fights.
The medical historians Ferdinand Peter Moog and Axel Karenberg have traced references to gladiator blood and liver as epilepsy treatments from the first through the sixth centuries CE. Their survey shows that the practice was reported over a long period, although the form and context of each account differed. It does not establish five centuries of continuous or universal use. Nor is there evidence that drinking blood prevented seizures. Epileptic symptoms can change over time, so recovery reported after a treatment cannot by itself prove that the treatment caused it.
2. When the Womb Was Thought to Move
The belief that a woman’s womb could move about her body came from Greek medicine and continued to be discussed during the Roman Empire. Some practitioners connected breathlessness, choking sensations, fainting and convulsions with a uterus that had supposedly shifted out of position. The Greek word hystera means womb, but these ancient accounts should not be equated without qualification with the much later diagnosis of ‘hysteria’. The symptoms recorded under such explanations could have many causes. The theory also reflected ancient assumptions about women’s reproductive bodies.
The proposed remedies followed directly from the theory. Healers might hold foul-smelling substances near a woman’s nose and pleasant scents near her genitals, intending to drive the uterus away from one smell and attract it towards the other. Ancient texts mention burning hair, wool and other strong-smelling materials. This treatment depended on imagining the uterus as something able to respond to odours almost like a living animal. Nothing in the description demonstrates that the organ could travel around the torso.
Some Roman-period doctors rejected the idea altogether. Soranus of Ephesus, a Greek physician working in the early second century CE, describes the odour-based treatments in his Gynaecology only to argue against them. For him, the womb did not creep towards attractive smells or flee offensive ones. He instead connected the symptoms to constriction and inflammation, and warned that rough handling, loud noises and overpowering odours could harm patients. His criticism can be followed in Soranus, Gynaecology 3.29, with Greek text and translation, where the disagreement is explicit.
Rejecting the wandering womb did not give Soranus a modern understanding of these conditions, and his own explanation remains a product of ancient medicine. His objection records a dispute among Roman-period physicians. Greek medical theories were inherited in the Roman world, but physicians still challenged one another over anatomy, symptoms and treatments. There was never a single unquestioned Roman doctrine that the uterus roamed freely through the body.
3. Urine for Teeth and Cloth Cleaning
The familiar claim that Romans whitened their teeth with urine draws on a satirical poem, whereas the substance’s use in textile cleaning is supported by workshop evidence. The satire records a joke about a provincial custom; the workshops document a trade. Neither establishes that urine was an ordinary mouthwash across Roman society.
In the first century BCE, Catullus made fun of Egnatius, a man whose conspicuous smiles displayed very white teeth. Near the end of poem 39, he calls Egnatius a Celtiberian and alleges that people from his part of Iberia cleaned their teeth with urine. The point is to embarrass this particular man through a supposedly provincial custom. Readers could understand the insult, but that does not establish that Romans generally washed their mouths with Iberian urine, much less that urine safely whitened teeth.
Urine was used more practically in fulling, the preparation, washing and finishing of cloth. A Roman fuller might have workers tread textiles in vats before rinsing and finishing them; decomposing urine provided ammonia that helped remove grease. Pompeii’s Fullonica of Stephanus preserves basins and other arrangements belonging to such a workshop. Fullers also worked with mineral cleaning agents and absorbent earths, so urine was one material among several. Its documented usefulness in textile processing should not be taken as confirmation of Catullus’s dental anecdote.
Urine’s economic value lies behind a story about the emperor Vespasian. According to Suetonius, writing in the early second century CE, Titus objected to his father’s revenue from the trade. Vespasian held a coin to his son’s nose, asking whether it smelled, and observed that the money nevertheless came from urine. Suetonius, Life of Vespasian 23 is the source of this exchange, though it does not give the exact later Latin slogan ‘money does not smell’. Nor can the passage alone establish a tax imposed in precisely 70 CE on every public urinal. It is evidence of a profitable commodity, unlike the satirical allegation about teeth.
4. Goat Liver for Night Blindness
Pliny’s Natural History also records goat-liver remedies for people who struggled to see at night. In Book 28, he lists several methods rather than one settled prescription. They include goat blood, the liver of a female goat boiled in astringent wine, juices from roasted liver applied to the eyes, preparations using bile and even exposure of the eyes to vapour from the cooking liver. Each method was intended to address impaired vision in darkness, although its ingredients and application differed.
Pliny explains the association through the belief that goats could see well after dark. That supposed ability suggested that an animal’s organs might somehow convey a similar power to a human patient. The reasoning was based on analogy, without evidence that sight could be transferred in this way. Pliny’s Book 28 presents alternative procedures and even preferences concerning the goat’s colour. Combining them into one universal goat-liver treatment would distort the text, as would attributing all of them to Galen without an appropriate passage.
Liver does contain substantial vitamin A, which is needed by the eye’s light-sensitive system. Severe deficiency can produce night blindness, and eating liver might improve sight in a person whose symptoms came from that cause. This provides a plausible modern connection, but it tells us nothing about whether Pliny knew why liver could matter. The Roman treatments were not all dietary: placing bile or hot juices on the eyes could be damaging. Night blindness also has causes other than vitamin A deficiency, so the ingredient’s nutritional value cannot validate every ancient recipe.
A potentially useful ingredient could be recommended for a mistaken reason. Practitioners learned from experience, copied inherited recipes and drew comparisons between human illness and the properties they assigned to animals. A useful substance could also be administered in a way that offered no benefit. The ancient explanation and the possible nutritional effect remain separate matters.
5. Snails for Wounds and Skin Diseases
Snails occur in several treatments listed by Pliny, though the common description ‘snail slime’ misrepresents what he prescribed. In Natural History 30.39 he advises pounding snails taken out of their shells and putting the material on fresh wounds. The chapter also discusses snails crushed with their shells for spreading sores and other mixtures intended to act on damaged tissue. These were animal-based topical preparations. Pliny does not describe a Roman cosmetic industry extracting and bottling purified snail mucus.
Injuries could be serious without antibiotics or knowledge of microorganisms. A cut or burn might become infected, and a healer could try to relieve pain, protect the damaged surface, dry a sore or encourage it to close. Ancient wound treatments used honey, wine, fats, plants and animal ingredients. When Pliny describes crushed snails for fresh wounds, his prescription belongs among many possible remedies for a common medical problem. Recording it does not show that most doctors recommended it, or that it succeeded.
Today’s cosmetics sometimes use filtered snail secretions, but that does not establish a direct medical tradition from Rome to modern skincare. Processing secretions for a manufactured product is quite different from grinding a fresh snail, sometimes together with pieces of shell, onto injured skin. The ancient recipe offers no clinical evidence of benefit. Neither does it substantiate claims that Roman practitioners assigned particular modern snail species to separate conditions such as burns, boils or lung disease unless those claims can be tied to exact passages.
Pliny included very different kinds of reported information in the Natural History. Observations that sound practical sit beside magical associations and remedies that can contradict one another. He was compiling an encyclopaedia of reported knowledge, not keeping the records of a particular hospital. His snail recipes therefore reveal the range of animal substances that could be considered medicinal, while reminding us that inclusion in an authoritative book was never proof of effectiveness.
6. Mouse Droppings Against Bladder Stones
Later retellings have confused Pliny’s instructions for treating bladder stones. Pliny does connect mouse dung with urinary stones in Natural History 30.21, but his instruction is to rub it on the abdomen. He does not say patients should swallow it in wine. The same passage separately describes drinking wine with snails and ingesting burnt snail shells in liquid to relieve urinary problems. Combining those prescriptions changes both the ingredient’s use and what the surviving source actually claims.
Bladder stones are mineral deposits that can make urination extremely painful or difficult and sometimes lead to dangerous complications. Roman practitioners encountered the symptoms without knowing the chemistry that produces the stones. They attempted dietary measures, medicines and, at times, invasive surgery. Pliny’s chapter on urinary calculi and bladder disorders sets several treatments beside one another, reflecting uncertainty over how to help. The Latin-derived term ‘calculi’ refers to stones, but gives no reason to believe that rubbing dung onto the skin could dissolve a deposit inside the bladder.
Pliny does not explain exactly why mouse droppings should relieve the condition. His account gives no instructions to gather fresh dung, pulverise it, alter a dose according to the patient’s age or mix it into a drink. Those details belong to later retellings, not the cited chapter. The evidence supports the abdominal application and no more.
A 2026 archaeological study adds material evidence to the history of excrement-based medicines, though it does not confirm Pliny’s particular cure. Chemical analysis of residue in a Roman glass unguentarium linked to Pergamon identified markers of faecal matter as well as an aromatic component comparable to one present in thyme. The researchers’ study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports interprets the contents as a medicinal preparation. The residue does not establish the ailment treated, the species that produced the faeces or whether anyone recovered. It does indicate that such preparations were sometimes actually made, rather than merely copied into medical texts.
7. Athlete Scrapings for Pain and Swelling
Greek athletes and Roman bathers used a curved metal scraper called a strigil to remove oil, sweat and dirt after exercise or washing. It offered a means of cleaning without relying on soap. A first-century CE bronze strigil in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows the implement’s form. The scrapings contained oil, bodily residues and grime. Calling the resulting material ‘athlete sweat’ alone hides much of what went into it.
Pliny describes the owners of Greek gymnasia finding a market for scrapings from athletes. In Book 28 of the Natural History he reports using the oil-and-sweat mixture as a softening and warming application for inflamed areas, sprains, tender tendons and swollen joints. The listed uses also extend to uterine and rectal complaints. Scrapings from baths and substances associated with wrestlers’ oil appear alongside these preparations. Such accounts support a trade in bodily residue as a medicinal ingredient; they say nothing about every Roman bath attendant selling jars of famous gladiators’ sweat.
Pliny places this commercial practice in Greek gymnasia and remarks on the ingenuity of their owners. Greek athletes trained and competed in gymnasia and festivals, whereas Roman gladiators fought professionally as public combat performers. Although both groups attracted attention for their bodies, they were not interchangeable. Pliny’s account concerns athletes, and the difference can be checked in the translated Book 28 of Pliny’s Natural History. Presenting it simply as a universal Roman gladiator remedy loses the context of the passage.
Such applications could have felt soothing for ordinary physical reasons. Oil softens skin, and rubbing can produce warmth; either effect could occur regardless of the athlete from whom the mixture came. Pliny does not provide evidence about how many people bought the substance, how well it treated each complaint or what happened in controlled comparisons. His text nevertheless shows that waste scraped off bodies in places of exercise could become merchandise, valued for its supposed medical power as well as its connection to athletic strength.
The evidence for these seven remedies ranges from prescriptions and professional criticism to satire, commercial stories and the surviving physical settings in which substances were handled. Pliny’s disapproval of gladiator blood, Soranus’s attack on the moving-womb theory and Catullus’s insult about teeth all remind us that Romans themselves judged medical practices differently. Treating the remedies as seven equally common cures would flatten those disagreements and confuse an ancient claim with a documented custom.
Most surviving descriptions were written by educated men. Patients, sellers and household healers have left far fewer accounts of what they actually prepared and used. Chemical traces, such as those detected in the Pergamon container, can occasionally supply evidence that the books alone cannot, though a single vessel tells us little about an entire tradition. Roman medicine combined skilled treatment and careful observation with inherited explanations and prescriptions whose effectiveness was never demonstrated. For many remedies, the sources reveal the advice that circulated much more clearly than the results for patients.
