eom

it's smart new us and dumb old them.

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Last edited Sat Feb 20, 2016, 07:38 PM - Edit history (1)

or who could afford to stay in a posh hotel, but farming people and other low sorts (meaning thee and me) had no access to doctors and if it didn't grow in the garden, they had no access to medicine at all. They had to hope the placebo effect from one of the weeds they boiled up, pounded into a paste, or distilled in an alembic would be nasty enough to trigger the placebo effect because that unpredictable and uncontrollable phenomenon was all they had.

Yes, foxglove provided digitalis for heart conditions, but I wouldn't want to for the leaves into pellets without a triple beam balance to make sure of the dosage and poppy straw would make tinctures and teas to ease pain, but most illnesses went untreated and the life expectancy, especially through childhood, was not much.

Are there better ways to apportion medicine besides the rich getting good care and the rest of us getting indifferent to no care? Oh, yes, but don't pretend that any ancient culture accomplished it. Only socialist systems have managed it and only if they've managed to keep the government agency that controls the purse strings from gutting it at the behest of the rich.

Thanks for posting.

To make bronze you need tin, and Cornwall was the main source of tin for most of Europe at the time. The breakdown of trade following the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the resulting shift from bronze to iron was an economic disaster for ancient Britain. Iron Age Celtic Britain was quite backward and poor compared to their more sophisticated neighbors in Gaul, who had big commercial towns like Bibracte.