Poets especially ridiculed surgeons for being greedy, for taking sexual advantage of patients and, above all, for incompetence. In his “Natural History,” Pliny the Elder, the admiral and scholar who died in 79 A.D. while trying to rescue desperate villagers fleeing the debris of Mt. “Physicians gain experience at our peril and conduct their experiments by means of our deaths,” he wrote. Scalpels, needles, tweezers, probes, hooks, chisels and drills are as much part of today’s standard medical tool kit as they were during Rome’s imperial era. Alongside were the remains of a man presumed to have been a Roman citizen.

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Persons: Pliny the Elder, ” Organizations: Physicians Locations: Rome, Hungary, Jászberény, Budapest, Roman