A Renaissance-era trash dump discovered inside the Forum of Caesar in Rome is brimming with old medical supplies, including 500-year-old medicine bottles and urine flasks — containers used to collect patients' pee for medical analysis, a new study finds.
More than half of the glass vessels recovered from the dump are likely what medieval Latin medical texts call matula — urine flasks . During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the practice of uroscopy was a central diagnostic tool for physicians. Urine flasks are tough to identify in archaeological contexts because their shape is similar to oil lamps, and they are rare in contexts other than hospital dumps.
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