Ancient Medicinal Recipe Confirmed: Galen's Fecal Remedy

Some of the earliest writings — including those inscribed on papyrus in Egypt and later in ancient Greece and Rome — contain recipes for making medicines. Finding physical proof, however, that confirms such recipes were prepared and used to treat actual ailments in antiquity is rare. Now, in research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers describe chemical evidence of a medicinal recipe penned more than 2 millennia ago by Galen, the famous Greek physician of ancient Rome. It involves a blend of human feces and fragrance. Such an arresting combination mirrored Galen's instructions for masking the odors of certain foul-smelling medicines. "It was a remarkable moment of interdisciplinary work," says Rana Çelebi, a medical historian at Istanbul Medipol University who contributed to the research, "to produce a uniquely tangible window into the ancient medical practice."

Medicinal poop isn't just a thing of the past. Some modern physicians have started using it as a kind of gut microbiome reset for those struggling with a debilitating kind of GI infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile, and are researching it for other uses. Rather than mixing it with aromatics to make it more palatable, today the excrement is sealed inside a pill or transplanted into the large intestine.

The recently published project began several years ago when Cenker Atila, an archaeologist at Sivas Cumhuriyet University, approached Çelebi and told her that he had access to a collection of ancient Roman vessels called unguentaria, long thought to be perfume bottles. Çelebi leapt at the chance to work with "these exceptionally well-preserved ancient glass vessels," she says. She was hoping to find traces of an ancient perfume in the long-necked bottles, such as those that "could be used in the temple for ceremony." "We thought, what if those residues could still speak?" she says.

The bottles were nearly 2,000 years old and housed at the Bergama Archaeology Museum in western Turkey. This is the city where Galen grew up and studied medicine in one of the most famous healing temples of the time. So Çelebi and the archaeologist teamed up with a chemist, Ilker Demirbolat of Istanbul Kent University. And the three of them traveled to the museum in Bergama for a very special mission. A police officer escorted them to the massive door of the archive. "We were opening these drawers, picking up vessels, looking at them," she says. It was for research but also, she says, "for the curiosity, because they were beautiful. And you were touching these thousands-of-years-old vessels."

The trio selected nine of them and scraped out their residues. "We were very nervous," says Çelebi. "They are so delicate. What if we break them? Then what?" Fortunately, no ancient glassware was harmed in the taking of the samples.

Back in Istanbul, Demirbolat ran the chemical analyses in his lab "to see whether they might match any of the well-known perfume or therapeutic recipes from antiquity," says Çelebi. Most of the bottles didn't contain anything that interesting. But one of them "ended up revealing something even more surprising and medically significant," she says. It turned out to be human feces.

"The use of fecal matter was all around ancient medical literature," Çelebi says. "Everyone wrote about it, even the Egyptians — excrement of donkeys, dogs, gazelles and even flies were used," though rarely that of people. "When we look at China, they also used feces." Such scatological treatments were considered a potent treatment for a broad range of infections and inflammation, though "we have no idea how successful they were," admits Çelebi.

The researchers also found trace amounts of aromatic compounds in that glass bottle, likely from thyme or oregano — perhaps used to mask the odor of the poo. Not quite 2,000 years ago, Galen wrote down this very recipe. Now it doesn't just exist as words. "Yeah, I mean, it's real," says Çelebi. "We found it. It wasn't a perfume — it was something totally opposite."

"This is the first scientific proof which sustains what is written in ancient books," says Maria Perla Colombini, a professor emeritus of analytical chemistry at the University of Pisa who wasn't involved in the research. "It's quite difficult to find these molecules." Colombini is impressed by the rigor of the analysis, but she can't be sure whether the contents of this particular vessel were used for medicine. Perhaps, she says, they were used cosmetically. "This residue contains a lot of information, but we are not able to know everything," she says.

As for Çelebi, she says early on, before she and her colleagues knew exactly what was in that bottle, they had the idea of hosting an event to present their research and re-create the ancient recipe for participants to smell and even taste. "That was our dream for this research, but because now we have fecal matter and oregano, we're not able to do this event," she says with a laugh. "I hope next time we find an ancient formula that was a real perfume and used as a medicine with a nice fragrant smell." That is, a top-smelling perfume — instead of option No. 2.