Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

What were your chances of surviving an illness in ancient Rome? How did the Roman army deal with ailments and injuries on the go?

And in what way were the medical practitioners of this ancient civilization,

similar to the snake oil peddlers of the American Wild West?

Well, Emily Briffitt spoke to Dr. Patty Baker,

a specialist in Roman medicine, to get the answers

to all of your questions about the treatments, cures and surgical operations of ancient Rome.

And please be aware, this episode does contain explicit medical details, including about fetal

death.

Hi, Patty, welcome to the History Extra podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Emily, and thank you so much for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to it.

We are delving into the world of Roman medicine today. Now, I've got to ask you,

how did the Romans approach medicine? Were there any

core beliefs behind it? There are multiple beliefs behind it, and there are many ways I could

answer this question, which could go on and on forever. But in general, the easiest way for me to

describe it is that ultimately they believed in the humoral system where the body was

made up of black bile, yellow bile, phlegal, and blood, and I'll probably come along and talk about those

later, but they believe that a good balance of those meant that you were healthy, and if they were

not in balance, then you were unhealthy, and they came up with

ways to do this. But also, religion played a large part of medicine. They had surgical procedures

that we still practice today, and they had folk remedies and pharmacologies, so it's a mix,

but also the Roman Empire was made up of a, it was very large,

...