The grave of a physician from the 1st century AD was recently discovered in the Jászság region of Hungary. Archaeologists from Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Jász Museum and Eötvös Loránd Research Network announced that the recent excavations from the grave unearthed a skeleton and metal tools. Archaeologists believe the burial was that of a traveling Roman physician during the early Imperial period of the Roman Empire. At the foot of the grave were wooden boxes filled with a number of medical tools: pliers, needles, tweezers, scalpels and drug residues. Near his knees was also a grinding wheel which could have been used to crush and mix medicinal herbs for medicine. The discovery is exciting in that it contributes to our broader knowledge of ancient medical tools. But can it also help us to better understand the relationship between ancient physicians and metalworkers?
Roman physicians, often called doctor or one medical in Latin, often traveled through the Roman Empire. There were also special military doctors, a thousand medicus, who could perform battlefield surgeries or medical procedures for the military. However, because the concept of large-scale public hospitals outside the military camp has not been developed until the last Roman Empire during the spread of Christianity, many early imperial physicians traveled with their tools to the homes of their patients in order to perform surgical procedures.
Although the physician Jászság was male, Roman women also trained as physicians and midwives to perform medical procedures across the Mediterranean and beyond. THE epitaph of a 1st century AD medical (“female doctor”) of Osimo (former Ancona) in Italy records the name of one such doctor, named Julia Sabina. another note a former female doctor from the Italian city of Pesaro named Artemisia. Julia and Artemisia were freed women; that is, once-enslaved women who were freed by their slaveholder. As noted by ancient historian Jane Draycott in his work on Roman medical practice: Prior to 100 CE, over 75% of known Roman physicians were either enslaved or freed. It’s quite a change in status from the prestige professional doctors often enjoy today, but notable for showing the importance and professional roles of slaves in ancient times.
In Jászság’s burial, the scalpels were found to be made with copper alloy and silver decoration, as well as replaceable steel blades. As they illustrate, the creation of medical tools was an art form in ancient times; one that required a skilled blacksmith or metalworker. A number of medical tool assemblies have been found in Pompeii, Roman Spain, Britain and many other provinces of the Roman Mediterranean. In the Italian city of Rimini, the so-called “Surgeon’s House” was discovered in 1989. The house contains the largest known collection of Roman medical tools never found in context.
Craftsmen who worked in workshops focused on metalworking and blacksmithing were particularly important to the medical trade in antiquity – and physicians could be quite demanding of their tools. The famous physician Galen, working in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD, demanded Norican steel for the scalpels he used on the spine. When a fire broke out in the city of Rome in 192 CE, the warehouse where the doctor kept his tools and books was lost. He lamented this fact in his treatise.On avoiding distresswhere he also mentioned that he stored wax molds there and then gave them to blacksmiths to forge for him. It is often forgotten that medical professionals worked alongside these blacksmiths to create complex tools this ranged from instruments for eye surgery to the speculum used for vaginal examinations.
Conservation, preservation and use of a technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF analysis) on metal objects by museum scholars were and are extremely important for understanding the composition of metal tools of the past. The Hungarian archaeological team enlisted the services of Szilvia Döbröntey-David to help examine and restore the metals excavated from the recently discovered burial in Hungary. A previous metallurgical analysis of Roman medical instruments made by Katherine E. Jakielski and Michael R. Notis reported that Roman medical instruments could be made from a litany of craft metals, including copper, bronze, brass, silver and gold. “Roman blacksmiths incorporated several types of metals into a single instrument design, such as the typical scalpel, which consisted of an iron blade inserted into a bronze handle,” Jakielski and Notis observed in their report. A 4th-century papyrus of Oxyrhynchus in Roman Egypt also indicates that Roman physicians could request materials such as copper sheets from metalworkers in order to create their own tools.
Historians of ancient medicine are already trying to contextualize and better understand this exciting new discovery. While most have focused on how burial adds to our knowledge of Roman physicians more generally, these physicians’ toolkits can also point out that the field of medicine was – and still is – deeply connected to the art of metallurgy.
