Drug Lore And Dietetics
According to the Nei Ching, a diet balanced in accordance with the fivefold system of correspondences will promote health and longevity, strengthen the body, and drive out disease. The first remedies were to be found among the herbs, trees, plants, and animals that served as foods. But medical theory and folklore taught that normally harmless foods could be dangerous under special circumstances, such as pregnancy. For example, if a pregnant woman consumed the meat of a hare, the child would be...
Mayan Civilization
Europeans may have caught glimpses of the Maya during the last voyage of Columbus in 1502, but they learned almost nothing about this civilization until 1517 when a storm drove three Spanish ships towards the northeastern tip of the Yucatan peninsula. Survivors of this voyage brought back stories of mysterious cities with temples containing great treasures. The encounter between Spaniards and the Maya was recorded by Bernal Diaz del Castillo ca. 1492-1581 , a Spanish soldier who participated in...
Hippocrates And The Hippocratic Tradition
Many of the early Greek philosophers and medical writers have been largely forgotten, but the name Hippocrates ca. 460-360 b.c.e. has become synonymous with the phase ''Father of Medicine.'' The establishment of medicine as an art, a science, and a profession of great value and dignity has been associated with the life and work of Hippocrates. Yet surprisingly little is known about his life. Indeed, some historians insist that Hippocrates was neither the author of the Hippocratic collection nor...
Surgery
In contrast to India, surgery generally remained outside the domain of China's scholarly, elite medicine. Presumably, reluctance to mutilate the body and the lack of dissection-based anatomy inhibited the development of surgery in China, but such obstacles are not necessarily insurmountable. Indeed, forensic medicine reached a high level of sophistication in China, as indicated by a text known as The Washing Away of Wrongs 1247 , which is considered the world's first treatise on forensic...
Santorio Santorio And The Quantitative Method
All too often, Harvey's success is simplistically attributed to his ingenious use of quantitative methods within a mechanistic framework. But as the career of Santorio Santorio Sanctorius, 1561-1636 indicates, allegiance to the mechanical philosophy and the ability to carry out painstaking experiments and perform precise measurements were not enough to provide meaningful answers to very different kinds of questions. Many seventeenth-century scientists welcomed the idea of extending medical...
Hammurabis Code Of Laws
When the Greek historian Herodotus visited Babylonia in the fifth century b.c.e., he reached the remarkable conclusion that the Babylonians had no doctors. The sick, he said, were taken to the marketplace to seek advice from those who had experienced similar illnesses. This story proves only that we should not take the tales told by tourists too seriously. As we have seen, Mesopotamia had a complex medical tradition. Both the empirical and the magical approach to healing were well established,...
Andreas Vesalius On The Fabric Of The Human Body
Just as Copernicus and Galileo revolutionized ideas about the motions of the earth and the heavens, Andreas Vesalius 1514-1564 transformed Western concepts of the structure of the human body. Vesalius' great treatise, The Fabric of the Human Body De humani corporis fabrica , appeared in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus 1473-1543 published the text that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the universe On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres . Vesalius was heir...
Paleopathology Methods And Problems
Because direct evidence of disease among ancient human beings is very limited, we will have to seek out a variety of indirect approaches in order to reach at least a tentative understanding of the prehistoric world. For example, studies of our closest relatives, the great apes and monkeys, have shown that living in a state of nature does not mean freedom from disease. Wild primates suffer from many disorders, including arthritis, malaria, hernias, parasitic worms, and impacted teeth. Our...
Womans Nature And Women Doctors
The ''Woman Question'' was the theme of endless books by nineteenth-century physicians, scientists, and philosophers. Using so-called scientific arguments to rationalize and legitimate traditional social and economic patterns, doctors portrayed themselves as scientists with special knowledge of female physiology. American physicians argued that women were condemned to weakness and sickness, because female physiology, including the menstrual cycle, was inherently pathological. In the 1870s,...
Suggested Readings Mnd
Arrizabalaga, J., Henderson, J., and French, R. K. 1997 . The Great Pox The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven, CT Yale University Press. Bainton, R. H. 1960 . Hunted Heretic The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511-1553. Boston, MA Beacon Press. Black, R. 2001 . Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century. New York Cambridge University Press. Brandt, A. M. 1987 . No Magic Bullet A...
The Medical Humanists
The Scientific Revolution is generally thought of as the great transformation of the physical sciences that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and is primarily associated with Nicolaus Copernicus 1472-1543 , Johannes Kepler 1571-1630 , Galileo Galilei 1564-1642 , and Isaac Newton 1642-1727 . Some scholars have tried to explore the problem of why the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe in the seventeenth century, rather than in China or Islamic areas, which reached a...