Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.08.17
Christine F. Salazar, The Treatment of War Wounds in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.08.17
Christine F. Salazar, The Treatment of War Wounds in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. 299. ISBN 90-04-11479-3. $78.00.
Reviewed by Rachel Hall Sternberg, The College of Wooster (firstname.lastname@example.org)
Word count: 1847 words
Warfare was a fairly constant feature of ancient life and literature, and war wounds no less so. Pliny the Elder tells us (HN 7.104) that M. Sergius Silus, a Roman fighting in the late 3rd century BC, was wounded an amazing 23 times in two campaigns. In a more famous example, Arrian recounts how Alexander the Great was wounded in the thigh, the shoulder, the leg, the neck, the shoulder again, the ankle, and very seriously in the chest "so that, according to Ptolemy, breath as well as blood spouted from the wound" (Anab. 6.10.1). Alexander may have owed his survival to superior care provided by a coterie of royal physicians, but ordinary soldiers who received less expert medical attention might also recover, like a certain Athenian named Polystratus who comes home wounded from Eretria in 411 BC (Lysias 20.14).
Men who did not immediately die of their wounds required medical care. In this most recent addition to the series Studies in Ancient Medicine, edited by John Scarborough, Christine Salazar (S.) presents an excellent and comprehensive analysis of the medical treatment of war wounds in ancient Greece and Rome as well as the literary treatment of same. She demonstrates how specific medical treatments were shaped by ancient concepts of anatomy and pathology and limited by the available surgical techniques and medications. The latter included fewer pain-killers than we would like, so the courage to receive wounds and to endure their aftermath formed part of the heroic ideal from Homer onward. S. shows how non-medical as well as medical writings can be used, with caution, to understand the treatment of war wounds; and, conversely, how war wounds are deployed in literary depictions of the martial hero. Her work corrects two frequent and mistaken tendencies (1) to take literary descriptions of war wounds at face value as actual medical events, and (2) to regard the medical literature as a genre completely separate from and unrelated to other genres of writing and thought in classical antiquity.
Amid recent work on ancient medicine, much of which has focused on women's bodies and gynecology, the subject of war wounds has received no full-length treatment; until now, perhaps the most interesting discussion has been found in Guido Majno's The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (1975), written for a general audience. Unlike Majno, S. does not attempt to determine the efficacy of ancient remedies; the strength of her work lies in its scholarly depth and breadth. The volume includes eight black-and-white photographs, although these are not of the highest quality, as well as thorough and extensive bibliographies, a 20-page index of passages, and a useful general index. The footnotes quote Greek and Latin passages in full. S. commands an impressive range of sources both primary and secondary. The ancient works she draws upon include medical and other scientific treatises, military treatises, philosophy, history, epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and oratory, as well as inscriptions. At least half of the voluminous modern scholarship S. cites is in German, French, and Italian; her own text is studded with medical terminology in English, Greek, and Latin.
Part I (Chs. 1-5) covers wounds and their treatment, Part II (Chs. 6-9) addresses wounding as a literary topos and metaphor for heroism in ancient literature, and Part III (Ch. 10) surveys the archaeological evidence.
Chapter 1: Sources (1-7): S. briefly reviews the medical writings that deal with war wounds, from the Hippocratic treatises, the earliest of which date to the late 5th or 4th century BC, through Dioscorides and Celsus in the 1st century AD, Galen and Rufus in the 2nd century, Oribasius in the 4th century, and Paul of Aegina, writing as late as the 7th century but clearly drawing on earlier material. She also summarizes the literary sources, non-medical'scientific' texts, and non-textual evidence.
Chapter 2: Surgical Aspects of Wound Treatment (9-53): S. discusses trauma caused by swords, spears, arrows, and other weapons. She has sections on hemorrhage, difficulties posed by arrows and other foreign objects lodged in the body, injuries to vital organs, fainting, inflammation and suppuration, the effects of poisoned weapons, "tetanus" and spasms, sepsis, gangrene, etc. She then considers, from the ancient