The Rules of Pre-Modern Medicine for Health

Most people today can admit that the ancient world had good ideas on a few thing: how to live the good life, architecture or how to endure adversity. But bring up pre-modern medicine and most people write it off as barbaric quackery, images of bizarre treatment, leeches, and letting patients bleed to death of death fill up their mind.

Sometimes you’ll see posts of about treatments pop up on social media that fit into this mindset, even though the treatment isn’t even true. It just looks like it would be true.

There are a number of rules to follow to understand pre-modern medicine and implement in your life.

Rule 1: If You Got Seriously Sick, Pre-Modern Medicine Couldn’t Help You.

Pre-modern medicine wasn’t for catastrophic, life-ending diseases. It was there for everything else, keeping the small stuff in check and, more than anything, stopping you from ever getting to that “very sick” point. They didn’t know about bacteria, didn’t understand infections. Viruses? Completely off their radar. They missed a lot, and people paid for it.

This was shown the best by the early 2010s show “The Knick” that had a great performance by Clive Owen. It was about a New York City hospital in the year 1900 and all the insane things that they did that worked a little bit but mostly didn’t.

The Logic of Ancient Medicine

If you avoided a serious malady things weren’t bad. Remedies worked for smaller issues. That’s because generations handed down remedies that kept people alive, creating a raw science, built by trial and error. They didn’t have labs, no data sets only just survival rates. You either got better, or you didn’t. These remedies weren’t hypothetical; they were passed on if they worked or buried with the last person who tried them if they didn’t.

Rule Number Two: Some Treatments Worked and That Wasn’t by Accident.

Here’s a tip. Monitor health research coming out of science journals like Nature or other journals. If you see a natural remedy to a disease that is effective and was available to the ancients, go on an AI search site like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini and see if the ancients discussed this treatment. You would be surprised how often they knew it before modern science. Or you can do the opposite and start reading ancient medical texts from Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus, Maimonides or Discorides and see if any modern research has tested it. It’s a fun Lindy game.

On Vinegar and Depression

Take vinegar for example. Last month, a study came out describing the beneficial aspects of vinegar for treating depression.

It’s an impressive finding. Turns out, vinegar can actually change the metabolic pathways of some key molecules. And the results? For those taking higher doses of vinegar, depressive symptoms dropped by an average of 42 percent, compared to just 18 percent in the control group who took smaller amounts in pill form. That’s significant.

I don’t have depression, but if I did, I’d probably try vinegar before jumping onto SSRIs. Any natural approach to treating depression deserves a closer look. Natural remedies tend to come with fewer or milder side effects than synthetic drugs, which can have their own issues with dependency and withdrawal.

Rule Number Three: Ancients Didn’t Know the Cause But Could See the Effect.

Pre-modern physicians worked with what they could observe. They didn’t have a microscope to analyze cellular structures or understand neurotransmitters. They understood what worked, even if they couldn’t explain why so a lot of their literature on treatments had strange reasoning on humors or “wet and cold” properties. But the effect is real, the payoff works.

We see the vinegar as depressant treatment in 2,000 year old literature with the Roman physician Galen. He classifies vinegar as “dry and sour,” qualities that would counteract the wet and cold properties of black bile. By reducing black bile one could relieve melancholia, which aligns somewhat with symptoms of what we might today call depression.

In the 11th century, Hildegard of Bingen suggests vinegar could support humoral balance, which influences mood and temperament. Her writings do not define “depression” as we know it, but balancing the humors alleviates melancholic symptoms.

On Honey

The examples are endless, really. A few years ago, Scientists discovered honey has great potential for wound healing.

Honey has been used to heal the wounds in many cultures in the world for thousands of years. Archaeological findings and early written works indicate that wounds were treated with honey by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

It’s now being brought back into clinical practice.

That’s why there is a long history of bee veneration in almost every ancient culture. It wasn’t the taste. It was medicine that saved your life.

Prevention Not Intervention

The real value of ancient medicine isn’t just in the remedies though, it’s the mindset. You were afraid of the doctor as much as you were afraid of getting sick. Both could kill you. Today, we’re not afraid of doctors or hospitals or pharmaceuticals very much. Is that a good thing? Healthy people die all the time in hospitals and the U.S. leads developed countries in prescription drug usage, with Americans consuming more medications per capita than many other nations. Hooked on drugs forever.

The best approach to health might be to live as if you’ll never need a doctor or hospital, using modern medicine only for serious emergencies or for early screening. This way, we maximize the upside without risking the downside of lifelong medication or physician error.

Rule Number 4: Prevention Was Priority One

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