How the Romans "reversed circumcision" and 5 other shocking medical realities from the ancient empire

How the Romans “reversed” circumcision

While circumcision was common in many ancient cultures, the Romans considered it undesirable. In certain parts of the Empire, men who had been circumcised – particularly those from Jewish or Eastern backgrounds – sometimes sought to “reverse” the procedure to blend in better with Roman society.

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However, circumcision is a permanent procedure. So what form did this reversal take? Dr Baker explains, “The idea is if you want to go to the Roman baths and look more like a Roman, you make [an] incision in the skin above the head of the penis, and then hang weights on that skin.”

By adding the weights to stretch the skin, Dr Baker says, “eventually it should lengthen out” – effectively reversing the effect of the initial circumcision procedure.

This would have been an extremely painful and slow process, but evidently the chance to conform to Roman standards was worth the agony.

Roman surgeons performed “embryotomy”

Childbirth in the ancient world was extremely dangerous – and Rome was no exception.

As Dr Baker explains, in some tragic cases, a baby could die during labour but remain trapped in the birth canal. With no other option, Roman surgeons practiced a so-called “embryotomy”.

This was a horrific procedure that was deployed in an attempt to save a mother’s life, and to remove the baby from her body. However, it was incredibly harrowing and distressing: “Sometimes they have to use hooks and break [the foetus] up. And the whole point is you save the mother's life. Unfortunately, it is very gruesome.”

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While obviously shocking from the lens of modern medicine, for Roman women, this was one of the few life-saving surgeries available in a time when maternal mortality was extremely high.

Surgeries were performed without anaesthesia

To make matters worse, this, and other surgeries, were performed without anaesthesia.

Romans knew how to remove infected or injured limbs, but with no painkillers beyond basic herbal remedies, the patient remained fully conscious during an operation.

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However, attempts were still made to reduce the pain and terror that surgery would induce. Dr Baker says “There is a little discussion that there are some opium medicines that people might have been able to take, but usually it's wine or try to relax.”

In reality though, the only way to reduce suffering was for practitioners to work quickly, making surgeries a race against time as the patient endured unimaginable pain.

Doctors had to ignore a patient’s screams to do their job

Surgeons had to balance speed – trying the finish the procedures as quickly as possible – with precision, all while not getting distracted by the agonised screams of the patient in the absence of anaesthetics.

“The writer Celsus says that a really good surgeon is someone who will work fast enough to try to relieve the pain of the patient, but slow enough that the screams of the patient won't bother them so that they’ll do a good job,” says Dr Baker.

This was an incredibly hard balance to strike, and a good Roman surgeon wasn’t just skilled with a scalpel, they also needed the mental focus and clarity to block out the cries of their patients and keep operating.

Anyone could call themselves a doctor

“Anybody could say they were a doctor,” says Dr Baker.

Unlike today, there were no medical licenses or regulatory bodies in ancient Rome. This meant that anyone could claim to be a doctor, regardless of skill or training.

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And, if a procedure went wrong, a bad doctor could simply disappear, moving away before anyone could hold them accountable. Dr Baker illustrates this, saying, “If something didn't go too well, they could sneak off in the middle of the night and who would know?”

This "Wild West" approach to medicine meant that while some physicians were skilled and knowledgeable, others were nothing more than dangerous frauds.

Romans had a vague idea of germs

The Romans were obsessed with cleanliness and built sophisticated public baths, aqueducts and sanitation systems. However, they didn’t fully grasp the concept of germs or how they caused infections.

“They do have an explanation for contagion,” says Dr Baker. “And they were aware that you did have to keep a wound area clean. They do talk about cleaning it. They say to use honey and sometimes wine or vinegar, which are antiseptic… they definitely recommend that and just keeping things clean.”

That said, in the absence of understanding what germs were, the spread of disease was instead pinned on ‘miasma’.

“In terms of contagion, what's very interesting is they talked about one way to get disease [which] was you could get a bad disease through a bad smell and they called it a miasma.”

In short, the Romans were on the right track with the knowledge available to them at the time. And, Dr Baker says, in general Roman medicine was restricted by the limitations of the time, but was “much more advanced than I think people give it credit for.”

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