Last week’s column ended with a Roman funerary inscription: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) explain.

Pliny devoted book 29 of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline ‘undergoes more frequent changes, and none is more profitable either’, Pliny pointed the finger at Greek doctors.