Ancient medicine was a combination of religion, science,
trial and error, the placebo effect, and an overall infatuation with the human
body.
The body was always something of great value to our friend
of Ancient Greece and Rome. Not only did they admired the beauty of the body
and find great value in exercise and physical prowess but they also took great
strides to understanding the body better. A large part of a Greek’s health was
dietetics, included eating, exercising, and bathing regularly.Since Greeks largely believed in the body's ability to heal itself they relied heavily on these principles, in addition to medicines or remedies.
The Greeks are known for simple systematizing of symptoms to
distinguishing sicknesses and diseases. Many schools were created to study the
body components and their response to illness. This chart displays some of the
symptoms used to create a diagnosis.
|
Element
|
earth
|
air
|
fire
|
water
|
|
Humour
|
black bile
|
yellow bile
|
blood
|
phlegm
|
|
Quality
|
dry
|
cold
|
hot
|
wet
|
|
Body Part
|
spleen
|
blood
|
liver
|
brain
|
|
Season
|
autumn
|
spring
|
summer
|
winter
|
|
Age of Man
|
maturity
|
infancy
|
youth
|
old age
|
All of these symptoms were used to calculate and diagnose
illness. Today, a book of diagnosis would consist of many more than just 24 symptoms.
Through the years our knowledge of medicine has expanded and we have found more and more cures and have advanced in technology. Over the past 50 years medicine has taken some extraordinary leaps! Surgeons now have lasers to preform surgery and cameras that you can actualy taken into your body and see the inside of yourself while the doctor explains to you about a blockage you might have.
Something like that is straight out of a 70's sci-fi comic book, or are tools that only a secret agent would have had access to back when TV shows wer black and white and there were only 4 channels to watch.
In the clinic where I work we have patients with seizures who use a tiny magnet that has a little wire that wraps around their vagus nerve in order to stimulate it if there it too much electrical activity. While the desire to help others and explore the human body has existed through centuries, our ability to do so know has been magnified! While we have accomplished incredible things in the medical field in the last several years, it is only by building on the foundation set by others, such as our ancient friends, that we have reached these heights.
Sources: Kindra Jacoby PA-C
Riverwoods Neurolgical Center
Elenor Betts
History Department
Open University
Your post was very helpful for giving me a better scope on how to do my own post, since I am also looking into the medical field. I knew that the modern and ancient fields of medicine are fairly different from one another, but you were able to spell things out clearly. My question for you is about the symptom and diagnosis chart you included. This sort of thing seems a little magical or superstitious to me through my modern eyes, but I do wonder what an example diagnosis and corresponding method of treatment would look like. Could you possibly provide one based on the chart? I know that it was used for diagnoses, but was it strictly for classification and not treatment? (I hope I didn't just miss it being said somewhere.)
ReplyDeleteI appreciated your use of figurative language: as you said, the "leaps" that modern doctors have taken are even longer and greater than the "strides" the ancient Greeks took.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning you said that religion and the placebo effect played a part in ancient medicine, and I would like to hear more about those. Was Greek infatuation with the human body inspired by the gods? Do we still rely on some placebo effect in our day?