Did someone call a doctor?

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.

Warfare also created an excellent environment to learn more about medicine.  Many skills learned by the Greeks such as surgical and first response techniques such as stitching, wound cleansing and the stopping of excessive bleeding were developed on the battlefield.

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