Medicine

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Medicine
Malaria at Decline of Rome Signaled in Child Cemetery
This article was interesting in the sense it gave us another reason to believe that 1) malaria was a epidemic
disease in the past, 2) why Attila the Hun did not continue his invasion of Italy and 3) the decline of the
Great Roman Empire.
To me, it was a horrifying and poignant experience to dig up a grave of infants (49 so far and the
excavations are still continuing). Dr. Jose Ribeiro, an entomologist at Arizona concluded from the bones'
analysis that the skeletons exhibited a condition known as porotic hyperostosis that were likely to be
associated with an infectious disease such as malaria. This was not surprising since the marshes around
Rome at that time were swampy and great breeding grounds for mosquitoes. In fact, the word "malaria"
came from the Italian for "bad air".
The multiple infant burials also revealed that the Romans practiced witchcraft and superstitious belief
because buried in the graves were decapitated puppy skeletons, and raven's claws. Basically, there were
two levels to the graves; the lower level generally had one skeleton but the higher level contained mass
graves each with five or six infants indicating the death rates might have escalated to uncontrollable rates
due to an epidemic.
It was even rumored that Attila the Hun stopped short of conquering Rome in AD 452 because the then
Pope Leo 1 told him of the unexplained deaths and sicknesses in the land.
Iraq Temple May Hold Key to Medicine
The discovery of the ancient Babylonian goddess of healing at Nippur, the ancient Mesopotamia religious
center by the University of Chicago team was a big step towards the understanding of ancient medical
practices. The site dated back to 1200 B.C. but there were layers of structures below the site that could
indicate the site was previously occupied to the time as far back as the Sumerians which was some 5,000
years ago. The temple occupied an area of about a football field. It was believed that the sick would bring
their own small figurines that would tell the Goddess, Gula, where they hurt and rituals would be
performed but precisely how these rituals were performed were still a myth. However, there were also
cuneiform texts that tell us the Babylons used herbal treatments and archaeologists were trying to
understand how these treatments could be associated with the rituals. Many historians believed that the
Babylonians along with the Egyptians were amon

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