The earliest references to what we would term medicine in ancient Greece come from Homer. In the Iliad, the poet refers to Podalirios and Machaon (sons of As-clepius), who treated wounded Greek soldiers. When Menelaus was struck with a barbed arrow, Machaon was summoned (Iliad, Book 4, ll. 217-219):
But when he saw the wound where the sharp arrow burst in, squeezing out the blood, he spread soothing medicines upon it expertly, which once wise Cheiron gave his father in friendship.
From this period until the fifth century b. c.e., ancient Greek medicine was an aspect of religion, especially the cult of Asclepius. According to legend, As-clepius was the mortal son of Apollo and Coronis, who, after his mother's death, was given over to the centaur Cheiron to learn the healing arts. Ascle-pius became a world-renowned healer. According to some versions of the myth, though, he eventually became too full of conceit, either going so far as to raise the dead or, even worse, actually charging for his services. The gods brought about his death. In some regions, however, he became a demigod, the patron of healing, especially in the city of Epidauros. His sanctuary there was one of the earliest hospitals. Those ill or out of sorts would come to the sanctuary, engage in purification rituals (often involving food restrictions and bathing), bring offerings to the deity, and then sleep in the sanctuary's dormitory, the abaton. During this sleep—or incubation, as it was called—the patient would receive a dream from Asclepius explaining what was necessary to cure the problem. The priests of Asclepius interpreted the dream, and the patient was hopefully cured (Kasas and Struckmann 1990, 37).
Countless tokens of cures have been discovered at the various sanctuaries of Asclepius, especially in Epidauros and Corinth, consisting of terra-cotta body parts indicating what the god cured for the patients. Eyes and ears bespeak corrected vision and hearing; legs and arms, cured limbs; and breasts, cured problems with lactation. Also present among the items found at the sanctuaries were medical tools, indicating that efforts beyond merely the dreams were used in treating pilgrims.
In the early fifth century b. c.e., the ordering of the natural world studied by the Presocratic philosophers came to be applied to the human body. This, combined with the observations of the Asclepian priests, engendered the rise of medical science. Two fifth-century philosophers who contributed early theories of human physical well-being were Empedocles of Acragas and Alcmaeon of Croton. The former devised the notion of the four humors, stating that the human body was mainly an ambulatory sack of different fluids and that the combination of those fluids resulted in different states of physical and emotional well-being (DeWaal 2001, 1023). The latter argued that good health depended on the proper balance of all conflicting qualities in the body: hot and cold, wet and dry. The word isonomia (balance) referred to a healthy state of body, just as the word was used in political writings to refer to a balanced, open, thriving government. Disease occurred when one quality "tyrannized" the rest (King 2001, 8).
Emerging from these traditions was Hippocrates of Cos, called the Father of Medicine (c. 460-377 b. c.e.). The so-called Hippocratic Corpus, attributed to him, consisted of some sixty or seventy treatises on various aspects of the nature and treatment of the human body. On an ideological level, Hippocrates was heavily influenced by the theories of Empedocles, believing that the health of the human body was dependent on the proper balance of the humors. As a result, remedial techniques such as bloodletting, purgations, and diet were common in Hippocrates's repertoire. But, true to science, the Hippocratic technique included a keen awareness of the importance of direct observation. This was most clearly expressed in the books of the Epidemics. Contrary to the modern meaning of this word (epi = around; demos = people/neighbor-hood), the Epidemics do not refer to an illness that spreads about an area, but to a doctor who travels about, making house calls. The Epidemics are like a journal in which the doctor recorded progressions of symptoms, and also his own observations and thoughts (King 2001, 12):
At Larissa, a bald man suddenly has a pain in the right leg. Of the treatments, none helped.
Day 1: Sharp, burning fever, he did not tremble, but the pain persisted.
Day 2: The pains in the thigh abated, but the fever was worse. He became rather restless and did not sleep; cold extremities. He passed a lot of urine but this was not of a favorable kind.
Day 3: The pain in the thigh stopped. His mind was deranged, with disturbance and much tossing about.
Day 4: Near midday: he died.
Through the end of the Classical period, Cos, along with nearby Knidos, was the center of medical studies in ancient Greece. The Hippocratic Corpus was written here, and this was also where the largest medical library was preserved. Contributing to the growth of medical knowledge was Aristotle (see below), who was himself the son of a physician. Aristotle did not study medicine per se, but his strict categorization of the natural world, and especially his work on comparative anatomies and embryology, greatly influenced the study of Hellenistic medicine.
The intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world emerged in Alexandria in northern Egypt. The Ptolemaic rulers of the kingdom invested heavily in bringing all aspects of culture to their realm, and this included building the finest library in the world. Included in their acquisitions was the complete Hippocratic Corpus. A unique development in the Alexandrian pursuit of medical knowledge was a brief lifting of the general ban on human dissection. For the first time, medical students were allowed controlled opportunities actually to see what went on inside the human body, rather than relying on accidental wounds or on analogies with animal bodies (King 2001, 29-31).
Two people to benefit from this new opportunity were Herophilos of Chal-cedon (c. 335-280 b. c.e.) and Erasistratos of Chios (c. 304-250 b. c.e.). The former might be considered the father of modern neurology. He studied the nervous system and the brain, and he was the first to determine that these two were actually related. Until this point, Greeks from Hesiod to Aristotle had been convinced that the center of human thought was in the heart and lungs. It was Herophilos who suggested that it was, in fact, the brain. He also made extensive examinations of the human reproductive systems, he studied the liver, and he is the first recorded doctor in the Western world to study the relationship between the pulse and health (King 2001, 27-28). Erasistratos is considered to be the founder of physiology. His main works were on the digestive tract and the circulatory system, wherein he determined that the heart functioned as some manner of pump.
Both of these physicians still believed in the four-balanced-humors theory of human health. Thus, typical remedies used were still diet, bloodletting, and so forth. In contrast, Asclepiades of Bithynia (flourished c. 150 b. c.e.), the first Greek physician to practice widely in Rome, was influenced by the theories of Democritus of Abdera (see above). Rather than from fluids, Asclepiades believed that disease resulted from overly relaxed or overly excited states of the tiny particles making up the body. To get these back to normal, Asclepiades and his followers prescribed therapeutic massages, fresh air, and adjusted diets (DeWaal 2001, 1024). When faced with a choice between massage and leeches, it is easy to see how his school became popular with patients.
World History
