Having been rather taken with Herodotus' endorsement of hirsute women as a national security early warning system, I'm coming round to the idea that The Histories may offer many more lessons for us to apply in these troubled times. After all, since we seem to be in a completely reality-free public conversation about health care reform at the moment, applying principles from 2,500 years ago to today's problems probably makes as much sense as the rest of the nonsense circulating in the certain realms of the blogosphere.
So I was delighted to discover Herodotus' description of the following Babylonian custom, which he describes as one of "the wisest of their institutions":
"They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is."
How's that for a public option? I'm sure it'd reduce spiralling costs.
Moreover, in a passage that could have been taken right out of the Sarah Palin playbook, Herodotus explains (though in his case not without sympathy) the workings of what can only be described as a Massagetae "death panel":
"Human life does not come to its natural close with these people; but when a man grows very old, all his kinsfolk collect together and offer him up in sacrifice; offering at the same time some cattle also. After the sacrifice they boil the flesh and feast on it; and those who thus end their days are reckoned the happiest. If a man dies of disease they do not eat him, but bury him in the ground, bewailing his ill-fortune that he did not come to be sacrificed."
Ya know *winks*, I betcha those darn Democrats have already got something like this up their socialized sleeves...
