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| Abdera General Hospital, 700 BC |
I celebrated TWO PhD students
getting through their vivas by twisting my ankle and applying my head to the
pavement outside King’s College London on the Strand. Twenty hours in University College Hospital with
severe concussion and a bloody eyebrow left me mystified by modern medicine. After 'only' five hours’ wait in Casualty a
kind doctor made sure I had a bed on a ward and told people in shades of aquamarine to give me various medicines, victuals and tests, most of which NEVER
transpired. At one point a nice man turned up with a wheelchair to take me to
Ophthalmology, but said He Didn’t Know Where the Clinic Was and Could I Show Him.
Since I had an eye bandage but no contact lenses, I was unable to oblige.
Concussion is strange. On Thursday I
felt happy and thought God was calling me. On Friday I wondered whether the
blow to my right frontal lobe might have had an unexpected therapeutic effect
on my morale. And this morning I suddenly figured out the solution to a brain problem
that has been besetting me for weeks.
I have drafted a 'public-facing'
book called The Ancient Greeks
1600 BC to 400 AD, but the Philosophy chapter has been criticised by
one of the editors for being too ‘abstract.’ Modern readers, apparently, can’t cope with
questions like ‘is the world of ideas in our minds prior to the material world
we can perceive?’ or ‘what is the difference between holding an opinion about
something and knowing it for a fact?’ Until this morning I have been at a loss how
to dumb down the Greeks for the contemporary reader, but the blow to my head
seems to have clarified everything. I rewrote the chapter in two hours, and without
ever using the words ontology and epistemology!
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| Location of Abdera in Thrace |
The process reminded me that a woman
with a head injury has recently changed the history of ancient
medicine, itself a factor in the invention of science and philosophy. Advanced
head surgery was performed on the thirty-year-old’s injured cranium at Abdera
in northern Greece—the city that gave the world the brilliant thinkers
Democritus and Protagoras--by the middle of the 7th century BC.
The remains of this patient show that complicated surgical
procedure on bones of the skull, including trepanation (the removal of a disc
of bone to allow the extraction of damaging bone splinters) was already in use
before the first philosophers and more than two centuries before the sophisticated treatise On Head Wounds, attributed to the physician Hippocrates, was written in around
400. The intellectual
approach of the Hippocratic treatises, and their concern with inference,
evidence, cause and effect, without recourse to supernatural causes, was one of
the godparents of the Greek ‘miracle’. |
| Abdera Excavations |
But as I think about that woman’s
cranium I can’t help wondering about her treatment. Did she ever get her painkillers and water, her ancient equivalents of
antibiotics and tetanus, or have her vital signs observed? Could her
porter find the way to Ophthalmology? We must assume so, since she lived for another
twenty years. I am going to be fine,
but my ‘disappearance’ in the hospital bureaucracy means that this is more by
good luck than good management. It is a sad day when I would rather be treated
in Abdera General Hospital in the late archaic age than in the British National Health Service of the
twenty-first century.
very nice place
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