The ancient problem of unscrupulous ‘doctors’

Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections of unregulated Botox variants to remove wrinkles. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) inveighed against such practices 2,000 years ago.

Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Greeks, and medicine was no exception. In his massive Naturalis Historia — a 36-book encyclopaedia of the animal, vegetable and mineral world — Pliny acknowledged the enormous influence of Greek medical theory, i.e. that health required a balance between the four bodily liquids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) and their many associated ‘powers’ in matching groups of four (e.g. heat, cold, wetness, dryness; air, fire, earth, water; spring, summer, autumn, winter, etc).

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Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

But that, he argues, was no match for practical, proven Roman remedies (forget theory) supplied by nature herself, ‘available everywhere, easily discovered and costing nothing’.