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Roman Rimini: the extraordinary Surgeon's Domus
A very rare Roman-era medical clinic complete with surgical instruments and drugs
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The Surgeon's Domus: evidence from Roman Rimini.
A very rare Roman-era medical clinic, equipped for day hospital, complete with surgical instruments, medical devices and drugs, exceptional find in the heart of the city.
The archaeological site and the history of the domus
To understand the layering of the excavations, it is first necessary to know a bit of its history because the Surgeon's Domus occupies only a part of it, the oldest, dating back to the second century.
Destroyed by fire probably during an invasion by the Goths by 260 AD without the surgeon being able to recover his very valuable equipment, it remained partly buried under the ashes and partly incorporated into the city walls that were erected to defend against the barbarians.
In contrast, the rich Late Antique palace that occupies the southern part of the excavations dates to the 5th-6th centuries and was destroyed at the time of the war between the Goths and Byzantines between 535 and 553. The site was later abandoned and used as a cemetery in the Longobard era; tombs are still visible as wounds on the magnificent mosaics of the domus. The area became first a landfill and then a square, and it was during work on its redevelopment in 1989 that this extraordinary complex came to light, the excavations of which lasted until 2007.
The domus and the surgeon's house
The Late Antique domus occupies the southern part of the excavations; it had an inner garden with a nymphaeum, around which extended many rooms, some of which had underfloor heating, all decorated with polychrome mosaics in geometric patterns. The outstanding part of the excavations, however, is the one relating to the surgeon's domus because it was a taberna medica, an outpatient clinic with hospitalization facilities. It was a two-story house, carved perhaps out of the portico of an older domus; on the ground floor it had a long corridor, a triclinium, a dining room, a cubicle for the hospitalization of patients, an examining room and a waiting room, all with mosaics; on the upper floor the kitchen and pantry.
The archaeological museum in Rimini: the surgeon's instruments.
Absolutely not to be missed, inside the adjoining Rimini Museum, is the reconstruction of the rooms and the display of artifacts, the 150 wonderful surgical instruments found during excavations. You will be surprised at how advanced Roman medicine was. There are dozens of precision scalpels, with interchangeable blades, even for cataract surgery, forceps for extracting arrowheads, skull drills. On the success of these surgeries, however, there were no great guarantees, at least if we consider the mild anesthesia and the absence of antibiotics... The rest of the museum is also worth a visit, but if you are short of time, push at least as far as the next room, you will see the extraordinary mosaic of ships in the harbor, found in the excavations of another domus in Rimini.
The surgeon of Rimini
But who was this physician? We get his name, Eutyches, from a thank you engraved on the cubicle wall left by a patient, who knows if the thank you must have pleased him so much... He was certainly of Eastern, perhaps Greek, origin, and had practiced as a military doctor, his instruments tell us so, almost all of them in fact being for wound or fracture surgery, and any gynecological instruments are missing. He was devoted to Jupiter, as were many soldiers, and liked to surround himself with refinement, as evidenced by the floor mosaics and what remains of the house decorations.
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