Gladiator blood and medieval cramp rings

And other treatments for epilepsy, the "Sacred Disease"

Epilepsy is a neurological disease that affects about 1 in 26 people worldwide. Although people who live with epilepsy have more treatment options these days, the ancients threw a lot of proverbial spaghetti at the wall trying to manage it.

Why?

Because gods and demons were at work

"In antiquity, this disease was accredited to gods and demonic possession, causing those with epilepsy to be feared and isolated," say authors Christian M Kaculini, Amelia J. Tate-Looney, and Ali Seifi, writing for Cureus in 2021.

If a disease was caused by deities or demonic possession, then healers had to fight fire with fire. In Greece, some drank the blood of slain gladiators.

Apparently, demons hate the blood of gladiators

"Between the first and the sixth century a single theological and several medical authors reported on the consumption of gladiator’s blood or liver to cure epileptics. The origins of the sacred or apoplectic properties of blood of a slain gladiator, likely lie in Etruscan funeral rites. Although the influence of this religious background faded during the Roman Republic, the magical use of gladiators’ blood continued for centuries...Spontaneous recovery of some forms of epilepsy may be responsible for the illusion of therapeutic effectiveness and for the confirming statements by physicians who have commented on this cure," write Ferdinand Peter Moog and Axel Karenberg for the Journal of Historical Neuroscience.

In other words, you could hang a kangaroo paw around your neck and, if your seizures abated, physicians might claim the paw did the trick. And so it was with gladiator blood.

Some ancients were skeptical

Not every ancient Greek bought it. Pliny the elder mocked practitioners. Despite a lack of evidence, he wrote:

"...these persons, forsooth, consider it a most effectual cure for their disease, to quaff the warm, breathing, blood from man himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life; and this, though it is regarded as an act of impiety to apply the human lips to the wound even of a wild beast! Others there are, again, who make the marrow of the leg-bones, and the brains of infants, the objects of their research!

Brains of infants?!

Pliny takes up the topic:

"Among the Greek writers, too, there are not a few who have enlarged upon the distinctive flavors of each one of the viscera and members of the human body, pursuing their researches to the very parings of the nails! as though, forsooth, it could possibly be accounted the pursuit of health for man to make himself a wild beast, and so deserve to contract disease from the very remedies he adopts for avoiding it. Most righteously, by Hercules! if such attempts are all in vain, is he disappointed of his cure!

Like any cure, he said, drinking Gladiator blood would never stave off the inevitable.

" Those who look upon life as so essentially desirable that it must be prolonged at any cost, be it what it may—and you, who are of that opinion, be assured, whoever you may be, that you will die none the less, even though you shall have lived in the midst of obscenities or abominations!"

In other words, is the juice worth the squeeze?

Hippocrates had a different theory

Hippocrates understood why people with epilepsy looked for cures in curious places. They were shunned, cursed. He called it the Sacred Disease, acknowledging its connection to evil spirits. But he was ahead of his time. He was…

"...among the earliest to attribute epilepsy to the brain and to suggest that it is hereditary rather than contagious. He described its clinical presentation as unilateral motor signs with an aura, which could serve as a warning signal that allowed them to immediately leave the public to convulse….He attributed society's misunderstanding and reaction to epilepsy as a result of divine fear which society had built around this disease.”

Unfortunately, Hippocrates’ hypothesis had little influence over the more popular belief that epilepsy had a spiritual or magical cause. Still, he wrote:

"It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character. Now while men continue to believe in its divine origin because they are at a loss to understand it, they really disprove its divinity by the facile method of healing which they adopt, consisting as it does of purifications and incantations…

He suggested a cure that fit the times.

"Its origin, like that of other diseases, lies in heredity. For if a phlegmatic parent has a phlegmatic child, a bilious parent a bilious child, a consumptive parent a consumptive child, and a splenetic parent a splenetic child, there is nothing to prevent some of the children suffering from this disease when one or the other of the parents suffered from it; for the seed comes from every part of the body, healthy seed from the healthy parts, diseased seed from the diseased parts…

In other words, epilepsy and seizures could be cured by rebalancing the humors, using the reigning medical theory of the time.

Fast forward to medieval cramp rings

By the middle ages, things hadn't gotten a lot better for people with epilepsy. So while gladiator blood-drinking died out, new cures popped up.

Beginning sometime in the 1300s, you could be protected from the "falling sickness" by a "cramp ring" like this one. From the Science Museum Group, based in the U.K., cramp rings:

Science Museum Group. Metal cramp ring, English, 1308-1558. A641034 Science Museum Group Collection Online.

"...were part of a practice that occurred in England, beginning in the reign of Edward III (from 1308) and ending during Mary Tudor’s reign in 1558. The monarch would bless rings by touching them and in so doing would administer the ‘royal touch’, which was believed to have the power to heal. These rings were typically made of gold and silver and sometimes featured a symbol or even a motto.

“The rings were given out every Good Friday at the altar of the Chapel Royal in the Tower of London. They were said to ward off cramp and epilepsy and after the practice was abolished under Elizabeth I, people began to make their own rings out of coins."

Sacred or profane, desperate for a cure

When a practice falls out of favor, there are still hangers on, who believe that last drop of blood, that last self-minted cramp ring, might still work its magic. How many of us take copious supplements, light candles on altars, carry a lucky coin in a wallet? None of these is unwise or harmful.

We throw ourselves at hope, damn the evidence.

I draw the line at gladiator blood for seizures, but I can understand how suffering drives us to try the sacred and profane.