To Heal a Wound - Four Medical Plasters recreated from Greco-Roman Medical Texts

The medical materials of antiquity are a diverse and multidimensional group. Generally, these materials have been rendered approachable in modern scholarship by categorizations of type. These categorizations, then, lay the groundwork for meaningful investigation. The treatment of wounds as a general category offers an excellent opportunity for a close survey of a particular type of niche treatment. Exploring this topic, readers will encounter a material known as ‘Plaster’- καταπλάσμα in Greek and emplastra in Latin. Reference to (and recipes for) different types of plaster appear in texts from a wide variety of medical authors from across antiquity, which speak to a broadly available category of treatment material (Krylova et al. 2018). This treatment type has been effectively unnoticed by modern scholarship, yet their descriptions embody a vast landscape of treatment, reflecting a progressive diachronic approach to wound care in antiquity. Other distinctly unique categories of material treatment such as pessaries (Totelin 2009) or contraceptives (Nelson 2009), have been discussed in depth for their literary or social qualities, but only brief explorations into the functional and physical qualities of specific recipes for wound care have been attempted previously (Harrison et al. 2012). In this paper, I will present the results of an experimental analysis which attempted to re-create four different plater recipes, including two recipes from Hippocratic texts, one recipe found on an Asclepiad inscription from Crete, and one recipe from the encyclopedic work of Celsus’ De Medicina. The qualitative results of these experiments help to inform a working definition of the “plaster” type of material as a unique medical treatment. The goal of these experiments was not to prove the efficacy of any particular plaster, nor even to prove their functionality as wound care at all. Nevertheless, by looking at the plasters as a type of material group, it is possible to gain useful information regarding the physical qualities of the treatments and their creation. Such a study helps to differentiate plasters as a distinctly different type of treatment than bandages or other applied materials and explores the physical limits of the plaster category. This experimental approach also emphasizes how treatments were written and published as formulaic recipes, which could be effectively recreated by the reader on their own without explicit instruction from a master of the craft. This study also explores the common-sense medical knowledge that might have been expected of the reader to successfully reproduce a recipe from text.