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Ann Thorac Surg 2001;72:1793
© 2001 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
a Department of Thoracic Surgery, Otto Wagner Hospital, Sanatoriumstrasse, A-1145 Vienna, Austria
e-mail: peter.hollaus{at}pul.magwien.gv.at
To the Editor
I read with interest the article by Santos about chest trauma during the battle of Troy [1], which gives us a fascinating aspect of ancient warfare and medicine. The wounds inflicted during the war between the Greeks and the Troyans were described for the first time by H. Frölich, a German military doctor in 1879 [2], who published several articles on medical military history.
Frölich described different numbers: he counted 31 head injuries (21%), 16 neck injuries (11%), 79 injuries of the trunk (54%) without distinguishing between thoracic and abdominal wounds, 10 wounds of the upper extremity (7%), and 11 wounds of the lower extremity (7%), altogether 147 battle wounds.
One hundred fourteen injuries proved to be fatal (77.5%). All warriors wounded on the head died, as did 81% of those wounded in the neck area and 85% of those with wounds on the trunk. Battle wounds of the extremities were only fatal in 14% of cases. The most dangerous weapon was the sword, followed by the spear, the stone, and arrows, which seemed to cause only minor wounds. The high mortality suggests that Greek war surgery was far from skillful intervention and only successful in the treatment of minor wounds. The lack of anatomical knowledge (autopsy was not performed due to religious reasons) hindered sophisticated surgical procedures. It is interesting to note that in Homer’s medicine, wound treatment was performed without magic rites or conjurations, suggesting that the ancient Greeks performed war surgery as an empirical medical science without magic or religion. Bleeding was stopped with herbs that also are described to have analgesic effects. Unfortunately, the used plants are not described and still remain unknown.
Machaon and Podalirius, both physicians who attended the Greek forces in battle, were both sons of Asklepios, then a Thessalian king and famous physician, who became a god in the later Greek literature. However, his sons joined the Greek army as commanders who actively participated in combat.
Only Machaon was mentioned as a surgeon. Arktinos, a Greek poet of the 7th century B.C., was the first who separated surgery from medicine: he described Machaon as the ancestor of surgery, while Podalirius became the ancestor of internal medicine, diagnostics, and psychiatry. Podalirius diagnosed the insanity of Ajax, a Greek hero who died during the siege of Troy [3].
References
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