Medicine and plague

Part of Tides of History

Seventy-six minutes recorded in spring 2020, two narrative historians talking about plague and revolution while living through the first of them.

Part of The Ancients

With Kyle Harper

Kyle Harper on the volcanic dust veil of the 530s followed by bubonic plague in 541, and on the argument that climate and disease set the limits everything else happened inside. Sixty-four minutes.

Part of The Partial Historians

With Debby Sneed

Sixty-one minutes on disability in the Greek world: the medical writers, the myths, and the gap between the two.

Part of The Ancients

With Kyle Harper

Kyle Harper on disease as a cause and not a backdrop: the Antonine plague, the Cyprianic, and the bubonic outbreak of 541. Sixty minutes, third of the Fall of Rome run.

Part of The Partial Historians

Fifty-eight minutes on a year where disease and the codification struggle ran together, and the sources blame the gods for both.

Smallpox, plague, volcanic winters and a cooling climate, put beside the invasions that usually get the whole blame. Fifty-three minutes of the case that the empire was ill before it was overrun.

Part of Roman Emperors: Totalus Rankium

Fifty-one minutes on the emperor who ordered the empire-wide sacrifice and died in a swamp fighting the Goths, the first to fall in battle against a foreign enemy.

Part of The Rest Is History

Kyle Harper with Tom and Dominic, fifty minutes on disease as a first-order cause of Roman decline, which is a newer argument than it sounds.

Part of The Ancients

With Laura Spinney

Laura Spinney on ancient DNA that pushes Yersinia pestis back more than five thousand years, long before the outbreak of 541 that was thought to be the first. Forty-eight minutes.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

Forty-three minutes on volcanoes, plague and earthquakes arriving in the same century as the political collapse.

Part of Tides of History

Forty-three minutes from 2017 on Justinian's reign running into volcanic cooling and then plague, reposted in 2020 for reasons the host states plainly.

Part of The Ancients

Forty-one minutes on Galen and the humours, and on how a theory of four fluids organised European medicine for fifteen hundred years.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Forty-one minutes on the plague of 541, which killed perhaps a third of the empire and ended the reconquest without a battle.

Part of The Fall of Rome Podcast

With Kyle Harper

Thirty-eight minutes with Kyle Harper on his argument that climate and disease did more to the empire than any invader.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Leanne McNamara

Thirty-seven minutes on Roman medicine: surgery without anaesthetic, a public water supply, and a life expectancy dragged down by infant death.

Part of The History of Byzantium

With Robert Bruton

Thirty-three minutes with Robert Bruton on the volcanic winters of the 530s, the coldest decade in two thousand years, and the plague that followed.

Part of The Ancients

With Nick Summerton

Nick Summerton on the epidemic that arrived with the armies returning from the east in the 160s: the flight from cities, the advice on staying well, and what Galen recorded. Thirty-two minutes.

Part of The Partial Historians

Thirty-one minutes on a plague that killed consuls and augurs alike, and on what an ancient city could and could not do about disease.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Thirty-one minutes on the 540s: plague, bankruptcy, the Gothic war restarting, and an emperor who would not stop.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Tim Parkin

Thirty minutes on growing old in Rome: no pension, a father's legal power for life, and a literature that treats age as a subject for complaint.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Half an hour on finding a doctor in the late Roman world, where your options ran from a trained physician to a shrine.

Part of Being Roman with Mary Beard

Galen as team doctor to the gladiators at Pergamon, keeping expensive men alive and learning anatomy from their wounds. Twenty-seven minutes.

Part of The Ancients

Twenty-five minutes on Roman eye medicine, known from the stone stamps oculists used to mark their ointment sticks, dozens of which survive with the recipe named on them.

Part of Emperors of Rome

With Leanne McNamara

Twenty-three minutes on a doctor who left the city as the epidemic arrived and described it anyway. Perhaps five million died.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Twenty-two minutes on the poisonings and exiles of the Julio-Claudian court, where the family was the government.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Twenty-one minutes on what the Antonine plague actually was, where Galen's symptoms are the only clinical evidence there is.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-one minutes on the plague that struck in 541 and killed on the scale of the Black Death. Everything Justinian planned after this is shaped by it.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Eighteen minutes on the climate optimum that made the good centuries possible, and what happened when it ended.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Sixteen minutes on the epidemic the armies brought back from Parthia, which may have killed a tenth of the empire.

Part of The Pax Romana Podcast

Sixteen minutes on the second great epidemic, described by a bishop who used it to argue for his own faith.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Fourteen minutes on Roman army medicine: what the evidence supports about surgeons, orderlies and field hospitals, and what the novels have added.

Part of Life of Caesar

Thirteen minutes on a passage in the Natural History that shows what a Roman encyclopaedia counted as established fact.

Part of Emperors of Rome

The bridge of boats at Baiae, the campaign against the sea, the horse and the consulship. Twelve minutes asking which of these are stories and which are policy misread on purpose.

Part of Ancient Rome Live

Eight minutes on Roman bathing taken as medicine: mineral springs, prescribed cures, and resorts built on water that was thought to work on particular complaints.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed