When the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States, the White House called on Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases. Within weeks, Dr Fauci – director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the doctor who had worked to fight AIDS, SARS, and other illnesses during the course of his career – became a household name across the globe. Millions of Americans have followed Fauci’s advice, and in many other countries people have been taking action, through lockdowns, social distancing, and other measures. Indeed the world has come a long way in fighting life-threatening viruses, and already vaccines are being rolled out in some countries.
Such swift advances were hardly the case in antiquity. The Antonine Plague (named after the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who ruled when it spread) struck first in AD 165, lasted for 15 years and then recurred in 189. It is now widely considered –though not with certainty – to have been smallpox, though experts today believe that it is a disease that has mutated so much over time that that same precise virus no longer exists. Historians estimate that it killed millions, devastated the civilian population and the army, and eviscerated the tax rolls in many cities where the death rate was impossibly high.
Though no one found a cure for the disease, the most prominent person who observed and wrote about its symptoms and possible treatments was the physician Galen (AD 129-c.216). Because of Galen’s accounts of the Antonine Plague, it is sometimes also known as the Plague of Galen. In Susan P Mattern’s well-regarded biography, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire, she points out that Galen cited a number of possible treatments, which, he found, worked on some patients but not on others. These included using milk from Stabiae near Pompeii and earth from Armenia. Then there was the less appealing option of urine from boys in Syria.
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