19. The Philosopher Who Encased Himself in Dried Cow Poo
In short, Heraclitus was a misanthrope, and his misanthropy led him to avoid contact with other people for long stretches. In those times, he wandered alone through mountains and wilderness, and survived 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“. He came to a weird end 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. Heraclitus tried an innovative cure: he covered himself in cow dung. He reasoned that the warmth of the manure would dry and draw out of him the “noxious damp humor”, or the fluids accumulated beneath his skin. Covered in cow dung, Heraclitus lay out in the sun to dry, only to become immobilized when the manure dried 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.
