Galen, but that it is acknowledged at all suggests the currency such an alarming idea must have enjoyed among the more credulously minded. And scorpions or not, the father of systematic western medicine doesn’t approve of basil. So, you can put that pesto in the compost.
An entertaining collection Galen is quite happy for radishes to be nibbled as an appetizer, but Dioscorides dissents: “It makes your food come back up.” Celsus thinks that “a cold drink is the worst thing you can take after sweating from exhaustion.” The perspiration has already cooled you, regardless of how it feels. Lettuce was already known as a soporific, an observation from which no holistic practitioner of today would demur. Boil it to release the milky fluid that gives it its name. As Dioscorides points out, however, it can adversely affect your eyesight. He also has rocket as an aphrodisiac—keep some rocket in your pocket—which should give the oysters a break. Bald spots can be made follicly fertile again by rubbing onion juice into them, but lentils cause elephantiasis. Whole-
bran bread is the least nourishing, Galen warns, before asserting that oats are good enough for beasts of burden, but not for people. If you run out of olive oil, skin can be efficiently moisturized with butter. And do bear in mind that wicked innkeepers occasionally pass off human flesh as pork. Caveat manducator. According to Hippocrates, people who need to lose weight should eat one high-fat meal a day, avoid bathing, sleep on a firm mattress, and go about naked as much as possible. After eating, while food is still undigested, we would all benefit, advises Celsus, from lying on our left side—the very side that has the full stomach. “Sex,” he adds, “is not a good idea in summer or in autumn.” Damn. Still, the lack of bathing, the firm mattress, and the laboring digestion should see to that. We can snicker at this to our hearts’ content, but there was a valiant attempt in all this to put alimentation—which could so often be the difference between ill health and good, or life and death—on a sound epistemological footing. Galen’s warning that certain mushrooms were lethally toxic is still worth the forager’s heeding, and his classification of apples by
their taste profiles—from sweet, through semisweet, to sour—is as impressive in its fineness of discrimination as it is for the fact that it is still common currency among producers of Calvados and cider. Nobody who grew up in a Jewish household would dare argue with Dioscorides’ assertion of the curative properties of chicken soup, and nor would many others. Towards the end of this entertaining collection, we find Dioscorides again, in the Materia Medica, at one of history’s threshold moments: “There is also something called sugar [sakcháron], being like a solid honey found on reeds in India and Arabia Felix [now Yemen], similar in structure to salt and crushed between the teeth in the same way as salt. It is good for digestion, good for the stomach; dissolved in water and drunk, it benefits an ailing bladder and the kidneys.” Even better with a little kola nut and coca. As its use tore round the globe, it would come to be really good for obesity, heart disease, dental decay, diabetes, and hypertension. Had he but given it the 2,000-year stare, he might have run screaming from his study.
THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 53
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