Before pharmacies and disinfectants existed, the only available remedies were prayers against the evil eye, herbs, saliva, and pee.
A man from Lodè, a small village in Sardinia, told me the other night that, as a child, since he did manual work and often got hurt, whenever he cut himself, he would pee on the wound because he had nothing else to clean it with.
It was something everyone did back then, because in the absence of a first-aid kit, people believed that nothing was more sterile than urine to wash the dirt out of a wound, later treated with herbal decoctions and, sometimes, magic.
Apparently, this practice was already used in ancient times, in Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
The ancient Romans, besides using urine for some medical purposes, also used it to wash clothes: since almost nobody had running water at home, there were professional washers called Fullones, who collected large quantities of urine from public latrines. (In fact, an “urine tax” was introduced, to be paid every time they went to collect it.)
Science now tells us that urine has no disinfectant properties: it’s not toxic, but neither is it sterile. It’s simply water mixed with the body’s waste products.
But whether peeing on a wound really worked or not doesn’t matter much. What matters is that the slow pace of life and the lack of ready-made remedies forced our ancestors to observe, to try to understand.
In a world without distractions, someone had noticed that urine contained a bit of ammonia and urea, substances that can indeed kill bacteria, but only in high concentrations. (Urine, though, contains far too little of them.)
This practice also reveals how different our relationship with the body once was: the body wasn’t something to fix or to judge, but a living part of the world.
Today, as we translate everything into data, analysis, and numbers, maybe we’ve lost our sense of harmony with our own organism.
Sure, science has taught us to heal better, but it has also taught us to doubt our own bodies.
Perhaps we don’t need to pee on our wounds anymore, but remembering that the body sometimes knows more than we think.
After all, in those ancient gestures, there was something precious: trust in the body, in the earth, in time itself.
