1. A Ridiculous Remedy
Given his views on the rest of mankind, Heraclitus was a misanthrope. That misanthropy led him to avoid contact with other people for long stretches, during which he wandered alone through mountains and wilderness, surviving on plants and what he could scavenge. As Diogenes summed him up: “finally, [Heraclitus] became a hater of his kind, and roamed the mountains, surviving on grass and herbs“. His ridiculous end came as a result of his affliction with dropsy, or edema – a painful accumulation of fluids beneath the skin and in the body’s cavities.
Doctors could offer neither cure nor relief, so Heraclitus, the self-taught philosopher, sought to apply his self-teaching skills to medicine and heal himself. He tried an innovative cure by covering himself in cow dung, on the theory that the warmth of the manure would dry and draw out of him the “noxious damp humor”, or the fluids accumulated beneath his skin. Covering himself in cow manure, Heraclitus lay out in the sun to dry, only to be immobilized by the cow dung drying around him into a body cast. He was thus unable to shoo off a pack of dogs which came upon him and ate him alive.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
AV Club – Wikipedia Erected a Page to Explain Ancient Rome’s Fascination With the Phallus
BBC – El Dorado: The Truth Behind the Myth
BBC – The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Status Pineapple
Best Glam Health and Lifestyle – Gladiator Sweat and Other Surprising Aphrodisiacs of the Ancient World
History Collection – Truly Bizarre Beliefs From History Will Keep You Laughing All Night
Encyclopedia Britannica – Herodotus
Found in Antiquity – The Five Strangest Deaths of the Philosophers
Gizmodo – “Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass” Used to be Literal
Hayes, Joseph, Atlas Obscura – The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity
History Collection – Creative Pranks and Hoaxes in History
Museum of Hoaxes – Cottingley Fairies
National Geographic – El Dorado
History Collection – Absurd Medical History Moments that Prove People Have Always been this Dumb
Paris Review, April 25th, 2018 – The Strange History of the “King-Pine”
Smithsonian Magazine, December 15th, 2009 – Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax
