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Ann Thorac Surg 2002;74:1291
© 2002 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Correspondence

Reply

^a Department of Thoracic Surgery, Otto Wagner Hospital, Sanatoriumstrasse 2, A-1145 Vienna, Austria

e-mail: peterhollaus{at}pul.magwien.gv.at

To the Editor

I appreciate the interest and the comments of Dr Aris concerning my letter dealing with military medicine in ancient Greece. The Pompeian fresco showing Iapis exploring Aeneas’ wounded thigh is one of the most famous pictures displaying ancient medical action. Iapis represents the beginning of the history of Roman military doctors.

Homer’s Iliad remains the oldest Western poetry identified to date and is thought to have been written in the eighth century BC. It is assumed that the battle of Troy took place about 1240 BC, 400 years earlier. Therefore, Homer wrote about a historic event that he did not see. The same applies to the culture and the persons described, although some of them, like Agamemnon, have been proven to have existed. We must assume that Homer, whose work should be regarded as poetry and not as a historic work, described the world he lived in and not the ancient Mycenaean world in which the siege of Troy took place.

The Aeneid, describing the feats of Aeneas, who escaped after the destruction of Troy to the area now known as Italy and became the ancestor of the Romans, was written by Vergil, who lived between 70 and 19 BC which is about 700 years after Homer and more than 1,000 years after the siege of Troy. Again we must assume that Vergil was not a historian but a poet, and the same things I mentioned about Homer apply also to Vergil. In addition, we must not forget that since the times of Homer, the Greeks had performed postmorten examination on humans in Alexandria. For example, they had identified the brain as the center of thinking (!). Alexandrian surgeons developed the technique of arterial ligature and experimented, though not successfully, with anesthesia using extracts of mandragora.

Thus the medical knowledge had changed dramatically and the techniques described by Vergil stem from a medical science that had been enriched over a period of 700 years. I do not know when the use of dittany was first described in the ancient literature, but we will not find any clues in Homer’s works. I am afraid that the herbs used in the Iliad still remain unknown.

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