The Roman Empire built an impressive sewage network and multiple public buildings for hygiene such as baths and latrines. However, we know that they lived in high fecal contamination conditions and that Rome, despite the efforts of the Romans, it didn’t smell good.
Because well, it is one thing to have an advanced infrastructure and another to have bacteriological understanding. In fact, texts by classical authors such as the naturalist Pliny the Elder speak clearly about using excrement to cure diseases. However, there was no evidence that these fecal remedies were actually applied because ancient medicine was partly a hodgepodge of theoretical formulas that did not always reach the patient.
Until now: a chemical analysis of a medicine bottle from Roman times published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports confirms it: the Romans thought that excrement was medicinal.
A “perfume” bottle with remains. Archeology professor at the University of Cumhuriyet (Turkey) Cenker Atila was working in the warehouses of the Pergamon Museum when he noticed that several glass jars from the 2nd century AD still contained a crust of residue, so he set out to find out what was there.
After selecting a candelabra-shaped one called an unguentarium normally intended for storing perfume or makeup, Atila and his research team carefully scraped the residue and passed it through a gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometrywhich is used to analyze and quantify traces of compounds within complex mixtures with a high degree of effectiveness.
What the analysis discovered. The GC-MS results returned compounds such as coprostanol and 24-ethylcoprostanol, which are biomarkers produced solely and exclusively from human and animal digestion. This finding constitutes the first direct chemical evidence that the Romans used feces for therapeutic purposes.
It must also be taken into account that the bottle comes from Bergama (the ancient Pergamon), the birthplace of Galenthe physician par excellence of the Roman Empire. The famous surgeon lived there between 129 and 216 AD. C., a period that fits with the dating of the bottle.
And wouldn’t that ointment smell bad? The results also showed the presence of carvacrol, which is the characteristic aromatic compound of thyme. The research team proposes that Roman doctors mixed feces with herbs with an intense aroma, such as the aforementioned thyme or oregano, to mask the smell, something that makes the treatment more bearable.
It’s not that strange. Beyond the joke of imagining someone spraying themselves with feces, the reality is that excrement is currently used for healing, (in a way) in the form of fecal microbiota transplants for serious intestinal infections such as Clostridioides difficile. In this, Roman doctors were ahead of their time.
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Cover | Clayton Majona and Heinz Schneider
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