I was a history major in college, and to this day one of my great interests outside of medicine is learning more about the past. Sometimes I even like to combine these interests by considering whether people of the past have anything to teach us about good health (they certainly have a lot to teach us about bad health in terms of death from things like infection, trauma, and childbirth, but that’s a fairly obvious point that you probably don’t need me to explain in detail).
Thus it was that about a year back, I was watching a documentary about the Roman empire and got to wondering: just how exactly did the Romans prepare their soldiers for combat?
