Yet for all its uses, for Cato at least, wool was not the cure-all that cabbage was. Cato advocated not only the consumption of cabbage itself to fend off illness, but the consumption of the urine of a person who has eaten cabbage. You must gather, macerate, and administer all these things while standing, and he who administers the remedy must be fasting. Administer to each ox or to the patient for three days, and divide it in such a way that when you have administered three doses to each, you have used it all. See to it that the patient and the one who administers are both standing, and use a wooden vessel.
Magical connotation is clear from the continual use of three of each ingredient.
The greater part of this remedy consists of foodstuffs from the pantry. Possibly the standing position is a remnant of psychological factors pointing to an earlier time of medicine man or shaman. The insistence upon a wooden bowl shows this recipe to be an ancient one. The Romans inherited some of their ideas of anatomy and medicine from their Etruscan ancestors and adapted them to the practice of the official state religion, specifically in the practice of hepatoscopy, or reading the divine signals in animal livers. Models of bronze livers which were used by priests to interpret omens within the liver have been unearthed in Etruria.