The history of medicine Part 1

The history of modern medicine

In ancient Greece, the disease was considered to be divine castigation. The symbol adopted for medicine was the serpent, thought of as a sacred creature immune to all diseases. With the passage of time, medicine moved further and further away from religion and magic: 530 BC: Pythagoras developed the idea of balances and opposites in matters of health. 430 BC: Hippocrates developed the idea of the Four Humours, signaling the boundary between rationality and magic. Hippocrates considered the body as a whole rather than the sum of a collection of parts and believed that good health was a natural state and that disease an abnormality. The focus of his ideas was to prevent disease and improve general health and to assist nature in helping the body reach its natural healthy state. 330 BC: Aristotle linked the four humours to men's temperaments—choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine and melancholic—a choleric subject had too much bile, a phlegmatic one too much mucus, and so on. In the early years of the first millennium, Galen(129 AD-200 AD) in dissecting animals cleared up a great number of basic anatomic problems: the origin of blood vessels in the heart and of nerves in the central nervous system. His description of anatomy of bones and muscles was excellent and helped to attain a basic understanding of human anatomy. In the 1400 years between Galen and Vesalius, medicine was stagnant, dominated by the idea of the Four Humours. Life was nasty, brutish, and short, and medical care did not help. There are many reasons that little progress was made in clinical medicine until the Renaissance, but one of them was surely that the only fit pursuit for scholars in those centuries was considered to be knowledge of God, not of man. Only with the flowering of humanism that characterized the Renaissance did that change, and it changed very rapidly. So the latter part of the second millennium embraced the advent of the great milestones in the history of modern medicine.