The past, and diseases that will screw you over

[hawkwing_lb]

Extract of a letter of M. Cornelius Fronto to M. Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. Late 164/early 165 CE. [220-223, Van den Hout, 1954]

Fronto to Antoninus Augustus.

Through all my life fortune has pursued me with sorrows of this kind. For, leaving out my other bitter experiences, I have lost five of my children and the timing of my losses has been particularly wretched, since in each and every case the child I lost was my only one. I have suffered such a series of bereavements that I have only ever had a son when I had lost one. So it is that always when I lost children I have been denied any comfort from those who were left behind; fatherhood and recent grief went together.

...Now, with the loss of my grandson, my own grief is multiplied by the grief of my daughter, the grief of my son-in-law.

One of the things that's rarely brought home to me with any immediacy is the extent of child mortality in antiquity. Fronto (a Roman citizen born at Cirta in Numidia, a man of letters in both Greek and Latin) was a wealthy man, tutor to Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius, suffect consul in the year 142. This litany of his losses, brief though it is, is a reminder.

The ancient world is not a wealthy one. Not by our standards. Oh, the senatorial classes of Rome had furs and silks and silver dining services, funerary busts in marble, horses, land, temples whose upkeep they undertook, exotic imported spices from across the Indian Ocean, unguents from Ethiopia and the Arabian peninsula. They're the 0.1% of the ancient world, the senators and the equestrians and the wealthy freedmen: and even they were vulnerable to the very same diseases as everyone else.

---

Hippocrates, Epidemics 1.4.9

Criton, in Thasus, while still on foot, and going about, was seized with a violent pain in the great toe; he took to bed the same day, had rigors and nausea, recovered his heat slightly, at night was delirious. On the second, swelling of the whole foot, and about the ankle erythema*, with distention, and small bullae (phlyctaenae); acute fever; he became furiously deranged; alvine* discharges bilious*, unmixed, and rather frequent. He died on the second day from the commencement.

Hippocrates, Epidemics 1.4.13

A woman, who lodged on the Quay, being three months gone with child, was seized with fever, and immediately began to have pains in the loins. On the third day, pain of the head and neck, extending to the clavicle, and right hand; she immediately lost the power of speech; was paralyzed in the right hand, with spasms, after the manner of paraplegia; was quite incoherent; passed an uncomfortable night; did not sleep; disorder of the bowels, attended with bilious*. On the fourth, recovered the use of her tongue; spasms of the same parts, and general pains remained; swelling in the hypochondrium, accompanied with pain; did not sleep, was quite incoherent; bowels disordered, urine thin, and not of a good color. On the fifth, acute fever; pain of the hypochondrium, quite incoherent; alvine* evacuations bilious; towards night had a sweat, and was freed from the fever. On the sixth, recovered her reason; was every way relieved; the pain remained about the left clavicle; was thirsty, urine thin, had no sleep. On the seventh trembling, slight coma, some incoherence, pains about the clavicle and left arm remained; in all other respects was alleviated; quite coherent. For three days remained free from fever. On the eleventh, had a relapse, with rigor and fever. About the fourteenth day, vomited pretty abundantly bilious* and yellow matters, had a sweat, the fever went off, by coming to a crisis.

Hippocrates, Epidemics, 5.75

Telephanes, son of Harpalus and his freedwoman, got a sprain behind the thumb. It grew inflamed and was painful. When it desisted he went into the fields. On his way home he had pain in the lower back. He bathed. His jaws became fixed together towards night and opisthotonos developed. Saliva, frothy, passed out through the teeth with difficulty. He died on the third day.

*alvine: of or relating to the stomach
*bilious: gastric distress; of, relating to, or containing bile; characterized by an excess secretion of bile
*erythema: redness of the skin caused by dilatation and congestion of the capillaries, often a sign of inflammation or infection.

---

Working, as I am, with the archaeological remains of Greek healing sanctuaries, I find it hard to keep the omnipresence of mortal sickness and disabling injury in the ancient world in the forefront of my mind. We don't live with similar mortality factors, not anymore. Not with odds like they did.

Someone in your living family would have suffered an injury that crippled a limb, either related to industry or to war; someone (or several someones) closely related to you would have died in childbirth; nearly everyone has lost children or siblings to childhood illnesses; very many people have recurring eye diseases which eventually progress towards blindness (if they reach their fifties, if not sooner). Phthisis - wasting, which probably in a lot of cases means TB - is common. Malaria's not unusual. Typhus (aka jail fever) and typhoid fever not infrequently reach epidemic proportions.

But for all that, there are men - and occasionally, women too - who live to their seventies and eighties. Okay, so fifty and sixty counts as old, but if you're a man, and not a slave or a migrant labourer (migrant labourers include mercenaries), the ancient world's not hell. You don't have buckets of material goods (a few pots, a few utensils and knives, the tools of your trade - which if you're a woman probably includes a loom - blankets, the clothes you stand up in and maybe something for festivals) and you're probably carrying around a toothache (and hoping the infection doesn't go into the bone and rot your jaw: see Epidemics 5.100) and one or two unfixable health problems, but you might have a reasonable life.

But whoa. The omnipresence of things that will fuck you over.

It's necessary to remember that.

Comments

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Yes - it still stops me in my tracks whenever I come across a reminder of just how precarious life was, and just how high the mortality rate, in the days before antibiotics and vaccines.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I give you also: amputation without anaesthetic and sterile technique. Eeeek, sez I.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

J and myself were discussing this a few weeks back, and we both decided we'd neither of us have made it through our childhood.

I've heard it said that children weren't valued in the early years because it was there was a high chance of them dying (oh! Not another child! Send it to the midwife and if it makes it we'll pick it up in a few years...) but that seems terribly unlikely. Incidentally, I've picked up a book from Oxbow called The Archaeology of Childhood which sounds like a curious read.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Child mortality. It probably would've got me too, though I was a hardy kid - that godawful dose of chickenpox with complications would probably have carried me off, if nothing else got me first.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

You know, it's got its drawbacks, but... I'd much rather be living in this day and age...

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Yeah.