British Museum (2023) p/b 222pp £40 (ISBN 9780861592326)
This magnificent volume, at whose the riches this review can only hint, brings to a climax one aspect of the life’s work of Dr Ralph Jackson (former BM Curator of Romano-British collections in the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory) i.e. his expertise in the BM’s collection of Greek and Roman medical instruments and other materials related to ancient medicine. Such material has been available since the opening of the British Museum with Hans Sloane’s collection in 1753 and has been substantially added to over the years, as the opening chapter describes.
Chapter 2 surveys and discusses the range of medical instruments in the collection, pointing out how difficult it is to distinguish with certainty between medical and domestic instruments (knives, needles and so on) among the earliest finds, but that by the 1st century BC purpose-made medical instruments had become common across the Greek and Roman worlds. They survive from individual sites but those from shipwrecks, fires, volcanoes and floods are especially important because they regularly provide ‘whole assemblages of material in the place and form in which they were in use’.
While there are many instruments of whose function we cannot be certain, J. points out that the descriptions provided by Roman doctors like Celsus and Paul, and comparison with modern medical instruments, can be extremely helpful. The rest of the chapter discusses in fascinating details the design, manufacture and in many cases exquisite decoration of instruments and sets of instruments, specialist kits, saws, drills, forceps, hooks, chisels, drills, needles, hooks, catheters, dilators, probes, spoons, drug containers, collyrium-stamps and so on. (Collyrium was an eye-salve [of which there were many types: eye problems were very common]; in solid form, it was impressed with information about its use by means of blocks of small rectangular fine-grain stone ‘stamps’, the information engraved along their edges, in reverse.) J. points out that the extraordinary quality, artistry, and decoration of so many of these everyday instruments might have arisen from the doctor’s desire to encourage confidence in the patient.
Chapter 3 contains the fully illustrated technical catalogue of the whole collection, chapters 4 (La Niece and Hook) and 5 (Stacey) examine the properties of the metal medical instruments and chemical analysis of the residues (among the ingredients are beeswax, conifer resin, fat, oil and plant gum, lead and zinc), and Chapter 6 looks at objects from the BM related to medicine and health, e.g. funerary epitaphs of doctors, images of medical examinations and surgery, records of patients from the Vindolanda, scenes of childbirth, baby feeders and the healing cults of Asclepius and Hygieia (the marble thank-offering to them has a misprint in the Greek). The first appendix discusses a collection of Roman surgical instruments in the Bristol Museum and Art gallery, and the second a unique Roman plunger forceps in the Ashmolean in near perfect condition, its plunger mechanism still operative, presumably because of its anaerobic location: ‘The workmanship of the exquisitely finished mouldings and smooth surface is of the highest quality as also the tiny teeth on the jaw rims which interlock with complete precision’.
Your reviewer showed the book to a pathologist friend Dr David Smith who wrote back: ‘It is fascinating to see the extraordinary quality of some of the surgical instruments, and the designs which are still reflected in some of today’s surgical instruments. I am particularly impressed with the scalpel handles, designed to hold blades of potentially different shapes and sizes. This is exactly what happens today—one handle can be fitted with blades of different size and different shape … the elegant collyrium stamps, the bone saws and in particular the bone drills and the instruments for cataract surgery are quite remarkable’.
The catheters, too, caught your reviewer’s attention (expertus dico…). They are very similar to their modern counterparts and adapted to both male and female physiology (‘they should be a little curved, but more so for men, very smooth and neither too large nor too small’ [Celsus]). They were made from copper alloy or bronze sheets; J. comments that the seam where the sheet edges were butted together ‘is remarkably close-fitting, hardly visible to the naked eye, a very high order of craftsmanship’.
There is a concordance of provenanced instruments, a lengthy bibliography and full index.
The photographs of the instruments in question, virtually all in colour, and line drawings (241 in all) are of the highest quality while the accompanying commentary exhibits rare standards of research, scholarship, technical analysis and readability. O si sic omnes … . It represents a stupendous achievement by J. and the British Museum, and at the price is an outstanding bargain.
Peter Jones