Happy Monday!
⏪Quick week recap
Twitter is firing half its staff, which new owner Elon Musk blamed on a "massive drop in revenue".
Twitter has confirmed plans to allow users to buy blue-tick verified status
The UN's annual climate change summit opens on November 6th 2022 with hosts Egypt billing it as the world's "watershed moment" on climate action.
Takeoff, of Atlanta rap trio Migos, shot dead at 28
Nurses across UK vote to strike in first ever national action
Arsenal thrash Chelsea to go top of the English Premier League table
⚕️Medicine in Ancient Roman Empire
🤔Medicine has been practised since the beginning of time, but have you ever wondered how it was done back then?
This article about how medicine was practised in the Roman Empire was interesting to me.
😲The blood and liver of gladiators were believed to be cures for epilepsy
“The spilling of a gladiator’s blood didn’t necessarily end after losing a fight to the death. Without a scientific understanding of the cause of epilepsy, Roman doctors recommended that those who suffered from the mysterious affliction drink warm blood drawn from the cutthroat of a slain gladiator as an elixir. Physicians may have prescribed the macabre remedies because gladiators were seen as symbols of virility who died healthily.”
💭Doctors used dreams as diagnostic tools. Many ancient Roman physicians considered dreams when making diagnoses and prescribing treatments, believing that they could be signals from the soul about humoral imbalances in the body. Doctors believed that dreams could reveal information about patients that was not visible through direct observation.
“Whatever the ill see and seem to do in dreams often will indicate to us lack and excess and quality of humors,” Galen wrote. For instance, dreams that included snow or ice were thought to indicate an excess of phlegm (a humor considered cold and wet), while those that featured fire signaled elevated levels of bile (a humor considered hot and dry). Galen diagnosed a wrestler who dreamed of struggling to breathe while standing in a cistern of blood as suffering from an excess of the humor, so he prescribed bloodletting as the treatment.
Cabbage was considered a wonder drug and many Roman doctors linked diet with good health and touted cabbage as a “superfood” that could prevent and treat a wide range of ailments.
“According to Cato, the leafy vegetable cured headaches, vision impairment and digestive issues, while the application of crushed cabbage painlessly healed wounds, contusions, sores and dislocations. “In a word, it will cure all the internal organs which are suffering,” he wrote. Cato even wrote that inhaling the fumes of boiled cabbage promoted fertility and that bathing in the urine of a person who ate a great deal of cabbage cured many ailments.”
Did you know that no formal training was necessary to become a doctor in Ancient Rome? Anyone could assume the title of doctor without taking an examination or meeting a set of qualifications.🤔
Some of you would call it pettiness but oh boy!...I would do the same.
Hold on…what?
💡Quote of the week
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
From “Atomic Habits” by James Clear
That is it for today.
✨Send anything interesting you come across this week my way! I enjoy discovering new things to read through my newsletter subscribers.
Have a great week,
Dennis