Rome’s “quack” cures: beaver anus and ass genitals
Animals played a major role in the Roman Empire, says Patrick Kidd in**The Times**. Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf. When the city was invaded by the Gauls in 390BC, it was sacred geese at the Temple of Juno who “honked in alarm to save the day”. (They were rewarded with a fancy ceremony and “grain for life”.) In the dying days of the empire, there was an “arms race” among ambitious Romans to collect the most exotic creatures: hippos, rhinos, giraffes and so on. As governor of a far-flung province, Cicero “kept being pestered by a senator to pick him up some leopards”.
Where animals really came in handy, as Caroline Freeman-Cuerden details in her new book, was providing ingredients for “quack cures”. Pliny the Elder, “the David Attenborough of his day”, claimed that ailments including cramps, vertigo and sciatica could be relieved with castoreum – “a secretion taken from glands near a beaver’s anus”. Mixed with honey, it could ease eye trouble; with rose oil, insomnia. Other treatments included powdered wolf’s head as a mouthwash; mouse dung for swollen breasts; and to sort out wrinkles, “the knuckle of a white bullock boiled for 40 days (not 39!)”. And be careful if a Roman barber ever offers you hair products. They used a “paste made from ass’s genitals mixed with urine” to cure baldness; and “the blood, gall and liver of a tunny fish” blended with cedar oil to remove hair. “Don’t muddle them up!’
The Knowledge