this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Even if some ancient herbs possibly cured some diseases, nobody had any knowledge about what caused them to cure them. There were no reliable ancient cures, because we were unable to create any before we had enough scientific knowledge about our bodies to consistently replicate their effects.
There was no magical golden age of herbal cures that later became forgotten. Medical knowledge was slim and based on guesswork throughout the entirety of human history until very very recently.
So that is why it may have been much better to have been rich in ancient societies, until you became sick. Then you were basically as fucked as the poor.
Cures can be forgotten without a preceding golden age. It's always one step forward, two steps back with pre-modern medicine, but that one step forward did indeed happen, repeatedly.
Many (well, some) herbal remedies etc. did and do actually work, it was just more difficult to match them to the illnesses they were actually useful against and they were less effective than our contemporary pills. e.g. they definitely had painkillers, disinfectants, emetics and laxatives. Calling them "cures" might be a bit much compared to e.g. antibiotics, but these types of things definitely still have medicinal use.
Some ancient herbal medicine did survive into the scientific era. Like the invention of aspirin is based on salicylic acid in willow bark which was used as a pain relieve for thousands of years.