Shipwreck gives up secrets of ancient medicine

StephenW

Shipwreck gives up secrets of ancient medicine                                                                                Adrian Higgins February 4, 2011   

IT HAS been more than 2000 years since a Roman merchant ship foundered off the west coast of the Italian peninsula, and almost 40 years since the wreck was discovered. Now the DNA trapped in medicines found on board is yielding secrets of healthcare in the ancient world.
Samples from two tablets analysed at the Smithsonian Centre for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics reveal a dried concoction of medicinal herbs, including celery, alfalfa and wild onion, bound together with clay and zinc.
The tablets might have been used to treat skin conditions or dissolved in water or wine for intestinal ailments such as dysentery, said Alain Touwaide, historian of sciences in the department of botany at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
               
The tests confirm that medicines written about in ancient texts were used, said Mr Touwaide, who obtained the tablets from the Italian Department of Antiquities in 2004.
The tablets, preserved in small tin boxes, are the first remains of ancient pharmaceuticals to be found and successfully analysed with advanced DNA techniques.
''I had assumed everything had degraded but they were in pretty remarkable condition,'' said a Smithsonian geneticist, Robert Fleischer. ''You could still see plant fibres.''
The ingredients include radish or cabbage, wild carrot or a relative, yarrow, jack bean, a hibiscus species, willow, aster, the common bean and nasturtium.
The ship dates to about 130BC and went down in the Gulf of Baratti off the coast of Tuscany. In the 1980s, divers retrieved several tin containers, 136 vials made of boxwood, a locker and medical tools. The large number of vials suggests the medicines were being shipped rather than being used by the ship's doctor.
Mr Touwaide said the medicines supported his theory that although apothecaries had access to hundreds of medicinal plants, they purposefully limited their palette to a few herbs but used them in different formulas to treat a range of ailments.
''You're in a better position if you reduce the number of substances. If you have substances that are easy to find and native to your region, you can always come up with a remedy,'' he said.
The Hippocratic Collection, a series of ancient Greek texts, refers to 380 medicinal herbs but ancient Greek healers relied mainly on only 45 plants.
''Nobody really knew anything about how the body worked or the chemical properties of these substances,'' said Mark Schiefsky, a professor of classics at Harvard University. ''It was a kind of folk medicine that did have a basis in experience.''
Mr Touwaide was heartened by the apparent absence of opium, incense or myrrh in the tablets - ingredients that would have diminished the validity of the other herbs as effective medicines. Opiates would have overpowered the other medicines, and the tree resins would have shifted the tablets into the realm of magic potion.
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