Research Training Program

Cecily Marroquin
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Alain Touwaide, Ph.D.
Supervising Scientist
Department of Botany

"The RTP is an indispensable opportunity
for aspiring scientists. The chance to work at top tier facilities, with seemingly endless amounts of specimens and the most influential natural history researchers of our time made for an absolutely stunning experience."

Quantifying Diseases in Ancient Societies without
Public Health Records

Although the pioneers of modern medicine such as Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen recorded the uses and benefits of therapeutics in the ancient world, they left little trace of the period's population health. In theory, the best way to uncover the state of public health, or epidemiology of the Old World (specifically the ancient Mediterranean) would be by analyzing information from the ancient therapeutic texts. By quantifying the amount of therapeutic agents available at that time, further insight can be discovered about the diseases prevalent, assuming that a high frequency disease would have had more medicines for treatment. In order to verify that assumption, this project analyzes the epidemiology of the 20th century, a well recorded time period, to make the correlation between disease and therapeutic agents. The study compares the most mentioned diseases from important therapeutic references of the 1900s (specifically all editions of Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics) to the leading causes of death throughout the entirety of the century. If a correlation can be made between diseases and therapeutic agents available in the 20th century, a model can be built to help recover the public health of the Old World.

This research was supported by a grant from the Latino Initiatives Fund.

Letter of gratitude