Organized societies such as Babylon and ancient Egypt supported the practice of professional medicine, including surgery, but it was in Greece that European or, more cosmically, Western medicine first emerged after the fifth century B.C.E., when the classic texts began to appear.
The ancient Greeks had many ways of healing the sick. Plant gatherers and drug sellers, especially of herbal medicines, were the key people in the establishment of the vast Greek pharmacopoeia. Women healers had their own special categorization. And there were two groups making up a motley crew specializing in diagnosis and treatment calling on the gods and their evil relatives. One constant in Gr…
With the rise of Christianity in late antiquity, medicine gave a greater role to religion; miracles became more important than enemas. Earlier medieval Christianity did preserve a certain amount of learned medicine in encyclopedias, and the creation of "great texts" gave a coherence and canonic orthodoxy to an ossified Galenism that survived into the seventeenth century. Folk or popu…
In the sixteenth century, Greek medicine was reborn yet again but with a difference. The upside of the fall of Constantinople was an influx of Greek scholars and manuscripts into Italy. A scholarly industry soon developed for the study of ancient Greece and for the publication of the works forming the basis of Western civilization, including medicine. In 1525 the Aldine Press in Venice published G…
Until the seventeenth century, medicine operated within the context of the Galenic blood system, or rather, two blood systems. Using chyle (concocted in the stomach from food), the liver produced venous blood, which moved through the veins to various parts of the body to provide for nourishment and growth. The heart was the source of arterial blood, a concoction of venous blood, and pneuma (vital …
The age of Enlightenment (and revolution), even in medicine, is how historians conceive of the eighteenth century. Centers of new or innovative medicine shifted over the centuries: ancient Athens and Rome, Salerno, Montpellier, Edinburgh, Leiden, Vienna, London, Paris, New York, and so forth. After the medieval creation of universities, learned or academic medicine, often connected to a clinic or …
Medicine was transformed institutionally, practically, and intellectually in the century after the 1750s. Medicine evolved from a cultural system to an occupation, as the practitioners of professional medicine grew in prestige and began to dominate their rivals, the charlatans or empirics of popular medicine. One of the striking intellectual developments of this period was the emergence of physiol…
Whiggish authors justifiably rave about the "stupendous progress" of medicine in the twentieth century; it was also the century that witnessed the greatest medical crimes in history. The wish-fulfillment can be detected … easily in … dreams.… A friend of mine … said to me one day: "My wife has asked me to tell you that she had a dream yesterday that…
Ackerknecht, Erwin H. A Short History of Medicine. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Whiggish and opinionated; students like its brevity. Bonner, Thomas Neville. Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bynum, W. F. Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth…
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