Medicine through time - Key individuals - ALL Individuals!!!

Important people to know about

- Shamans in the prehistoric time

• Conducted rituals involving magic and charms
• This was to cure people of illnesses
• This was a form or faith or spiritual healing

- Sekhmet, was a Goddess in Ancient Egyptian time

• Was a Goddess who caused and cured disease
• Thoth (another doctor) was the God who gave the doctors the skill to cure

- Hippocrates (Ancient Greece)

• Approach was based on natural explanations, rather than supernatural
• He explored the works of earlier philosphers, eg Pythagoras
• "A healthy body is one with perfect balence" This is what Pythagoras said
• He rejected magical cures
• Told doctors to rely on observation of medical practices not on superstition
• His ideas were developed by his followers, e.g. Clinical observation
• Clinical observation came to be based on four things: diagnoses, prgonosis, observation and treatment
• His ideas resulted in the hippocratic oath- and is still used to date!
• His ideas were written in the hippocratic corpus.

-Aristotle (still ancient greece)

- He built on the idea of Hippocrates

- He developed ideas on causes and treatment of disease

- He said that the body s made up of four liquids

- Those were (blood, black bile, phlemgh and yellow bile)

- This was known as the theory of four humours

-The treatmen was to restor the balence and doctors did this byfor example gtting rifd of any excess blood.

-This progress in medicine came fom the fact that he people of Ancient Greece had Alexandria... Where they could basically do dissections, this is because people like Aristotle said that the soul left the body after death.

- Vivisections were carried out on living criminals.

- Alexandria becme more and more famous. And as the doctors spread to different parts of the world their ideas became more and more accepted and known

The Romans then took over Greece and in doing so they initially rejected the ideas of the Greeks. Greek doctors= slaves. Their knowledge and skill was feared, as a reult, medicine in Ancient Rome was not of high status.

- An outbreak of plague led to the setting up of an Ascleipion in Rome.

- When Julius Ceaser came to power he gave the right for Greek doctors to have roman citizenship and so Greeks came to dominated the medical profession.

- Dioscorides (Greek doctor, but now a Roman citizen)

- He was an important soldier doctor.

- He worked aroung 800AD in the Roman army

- He was one of the first ever people to describe the medical uses of plants in his book called the (de Materia Medica), it did not using supernaturl charms and rituals. It was used by doctors for more than 1000 years.

-Galen (Very imortanT!!!)

- Galen was Greek (born in turkey)

- Born in abour 129 AD

- He supported the idea of Hippocrates

He followed Hippocrates idea of clinical observation

- He also believed in aristotles theory of the four humours

- This allowed for the continuity…