Dr. Francis McIntosh

It's the only one along the wall, but each unit would have had a medicus and would have had orderlies.

And we find medical equipment at all the sites.

We've got lots of lovely ones at Corbridge, although some of them are a little bit gruesome when you start to think about it.

They performed cataract operations.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, there's lots of probes and long things.

And I think particularly men, there's quite a few related to those.

But medicine is very bound up with what we would now see as magic and religion.

And so there's Asclepius, you know, the god of health care and his serpent twisted around his staff.

That's still a symbol of pharmacies, isn't it now?

And, you know, amber and jet and other sort of specific sort of minerals had these magical properties.

Maybe they were electrostatic and they were thought to do, you know, so you'd... Which would be jet as well, so quite local.

Exactly, the jet, yeah.

You know, jet is electrostatic, so it's thought to have magical properties.

So you might go and see a doctor, but you might also make an offering to Sclepius and you might also...

greek is often used in magical texts and so you know you make an incantation in greek over something i think the soldiers would have had fairly good medical care for the time and the romans understood the basic you know they understood that stagnant water wasn't good so you need to keep your water moving and keep it fresh they did understand about fresh air obviously they didn't understand about germs passing and you know all their tanks aligned with lead there's lots of lead water pipes yes yeah lead makeup if i was a woman so for the time the soldiers were

Yeah, so it's a real mix of what we find and there are deities that are only known about on Hadrian's Wall, not anywhere else.

And one of them, for example, is the Hueterers or the Veterers or there's many variations of how you spell it and they're a

Group of deities, a single deity, a pair, we don't know because there's never any real information about who they are.

But we only really find on the wall.