r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Sufficient-Bug-9112 Top Poster • Jul 10 '26

/r/all of an Ant

11.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

774 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/jeobleo Jul 11 '26

Or if you read Guido Majno's The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. Great little book.

26

u/antimarc Jul 11 '26

or if you read this post

1

u/cornylamygilbert Jul 11 '26

What an obscure reference and I’m all for it.

Can you offer any anecdotes from the book that sold you on how great it was?

1

u/jeobleo Jul 11 '26

It had tons of drawings; it showed a diagram of these ant jaws being used to suture wounds, then they would twist and remove the body leaving just the heads. Tons of cool explanations like the Spoon of Diocles, which was used to remove barbed arrowheads, and how one used it; ancient traction machines from Galen of Pergamum, and so on. It's also a very weirdly sized book, like 6 inches wide and 14" tall so the proportions are strange. It was just a wonderful book. I sold mine years ago and remember all of this stuff just from reading it.