Archaeologists found, inside the Forum of Caesar in the city of Rome, a landfill containing a number of discarded medical artifacts, including medicine bottles and urinals – or chamber pots, containers for collecting and analyzing the urine of patients – from 500 years ago. The area began to be excavated in 2021, and has gone through several uses throughout history, keeping objects of the most diverse and with the most different ages.
The Forum of Caesar was completed in 46 BC, and was dedicated to the eponymous Julius Caesar. About 1,500 years later, however, the area ended up being used by the bakers’ guild to build the Ospedale dei Fornari, or Bakers’ Hospital, where a landfill was also made to dispose of medical equipment. A study of objects from the 16th century was published in the scientific journal Antiquity.
Renaissance cistern and its artifacts
While exploring the landfill, the team of scientists, who had help from the Caesar’s Forum Excavation Project, discovered a cistern filled with ceramic vessels, rosary beads, broken glass jugs and personal items like coins and a miniature camel. in ceramics. Most of the items were related to the Ospedale dei Fornari routine, and the researchers suggested that patients receive a “welcome kit” with a pitcher, a glass, a bowl and a plate, as a hygiene measure. .
More than half of the glass vessels recovered from the landfill are likely what medieval Latin texts called a “matula” — a urinal. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, uroscopy was one of the main diagnostic methods used by physicians. Poured into a flask, the urine was analyzed for color, sedimentation, smell, and even taste in some cases.
Analyzing urine could reveal conditions such as jaundice, kidney disease or diabetes, as diabetic urine can smell or taste sweet from excess glucose. The problem is that jars of this type are difficult to identify in archaeological analysis, as their shape is similar to that of oil lamps. Urinals are rare in contexts other than hospital landfills, such as Ospedale dei Fornari.
In addition to these objects, the cistern also revealed lead clamps, used in furniture, along with charred or fire-treated wood. This may be evidence of a historical hygiene practice: setting fire to objects or houses that showed cases of the bubonic plague, as published by the Italian physician Quinto Tiberio Angelo, in his Rules for Preventing the Spread of the Disease, published in 1588.
Once filled, the cistern was sealed with a layer of clay, presumably for hygiene purposes. Landfills already existed outside the city of Rome at this time, but it was common to throw waste into cellars, courtyards and cisterns, although it was prohibited. In the case studied, the cistern must have been selected with a suitable place to seal toxic waste.
Although we now know that cooking or boiling glass is enough to sterilize it, people at the time were unaware of this possibility. They said the material could withstand heat at that point, but they did not apply fire with the aim of sterilizing. Evidence of disposal practices had already been found at the Ospedale dei Fornari, but in this case, the research focused on the medical and hospital context of the objects.
According to the scientists, the study should broaden our understanding of past practices, while also revealing the need for more in-depth studies of hygiene and disease control practices in Early Modern Europe.
Source: Antiquity
