Since time immemorial, mankind has striven to answer certain questions. Do humans possess a soul? Where does it go when the body dies? And what can we do to stop going bald? The ancient Egyptians mixed a balm from the fats of lions, hippos, crocodiles, cats and serpents and spread the paste on balding heads. Plagued by his own hair loss, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, used pigeon droppings mixed with horseradish and opium to coax follicles back into action.
Now the painstaking translation of cuniform tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrians, reveals a modestly more palatable concoction involving anointment by mixtures of oils combined with shaving that boasts of full recovery. Little, alas, seems to have changed in the ensuing 2,600 years, except perhaps the cost. The global anti-baldness industry is now worth £3.5 billion a year, more than the national budget of Macedonia, the baldest country of all.
It was a daughter of Macedonia, Cleopatra, who tried to help her lover, Julius Caesar, cling to his disappearing locks by personally applying a home-made remedy of mice ground up with horse’s teeth and bear grease. Perhaps she wanted to wean him off his “illusion styling”, better known in the modern era as a comb-over, no more convincing then than now. Victorian doctors believed baldness could be prevented by fresh air and exercise. Finasteride, a modern day anti-balding treatment, has been linked to impotence, somewhat offsetting its utility.
In fact, Hippocrates had guessed what the only proven cure so far could be, when he observed that eunuchs, castrated in early childhood, never seemed to lose their hair. Meanwhile the best advice remains that of the British Medical Journal. It suggests “encouraging [young men] to come to terms with baldness is still the best response.”
