Hello everyone and we hope you enjoy this amazing blog post by one of our monthly writers, Shevaun. Shevaun has written about how medicine has advanced globally and disparities between different areas. Thank you for all of your hard work and we are sure that our readers will thoroughly enjoy it.
In early medicine most of the knowledge they had was learnt from studying previous drawings and bony remains from early humans. One of the most interesting methods of providing the disease with means of escape from the body was by making a hole about 2.5 to 5 cm in the skull of the victim and this practice was known as trepanning. Trepanned skulls have been found in Britain, France and other parts of Europe.
Treatments and medicines that produced no physical effects on the body could nevertheless make a patient feel better when both healer and patient believed in their efficacy. This so-called placebo effect is very much in use today.
Here are some examples of countries and their history of medicine:
Indian medicine possibly dates as far back as the 2nd millennium BCE. The golden age of Indian medicine, from 800 BCE until about 1000 CE, was marked especially by the production of the medical treatises known as the Charaka-samhita and Sushruta-samhita. Because Hindus were prohibited by their religion from cutting the dead body, their knowledge of anatomy was limited. The Sushruta-samhita recommends that a body be placed in a basket and sunk in a river for seven days. On its removal the parts could be easily separated without cutting. As a result of these crude methods, the emphasis in Hindu anatomy was given first to the bones and then to the muscles, ligaments, and joints. The nerves, blood vessels, and internal organs were very imperfectly known.
The Chinese system of medicine is of great antiquity and is independent of any recorded external influences. Most of the Chinese medical literature is founded on the Huangdi neijing, and it is still regarded as a great authority. The human body, like matter in general, is made up of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. With these are associated other groups of five, such as the five planets, the five conditions of the atmosphere, the five colours, and the five tones. Health, character, and the success of all political and private ventures are determined by the preponderance, at the time, of the yin or the yang, and the great aim of ancient Chinese medicine is to control their proportions in the body.
The most interesting features of Japanese medicine are the extent to which it was derivative and the rapidity with which, after a slow start, it became Westernized and scientific. In early times disease was regarded as sent by the gods or produced by the influence of evil spirits. Treatment and prevention were based largely on religious practices, such as prayers, incantations, and exorcism; at a later date drugs and bloodletting were also employed.
The transition from magic to science was a gradual process that lasted for centuries, and there is little doubt that ancient Greece inherited much from Babylonia and Egypt and even from India and China. Modern readers of the Homeric tales the Iliad and the Odyssey may well be bewildered by the narrow distinction between gods and humans among the characters and between historical fact and poetic fancy in the story. Two characters, military surgeons Podaleirius and Machaon, are said to have been sons of Asclepius, the god of medicine. The divine Asclepius may have originated in a human Asclepius who lived about 1200 BCE and is said to have performed many miracles of healing.
Asclepius was worshipped in hundreds of temples throughout Greece, the remains of which may still be seen at Epidaurus, Cos, Athens, and elsewhere. To these resorts, or hospitals, sick persons went for the healing ritual known as incubation, or temple sleep. They lay down to sleep in the dormitory, or abaton, and were visited in their dreams by Asclepius or by one of his priests, who gave advice. In the morning the patient often is said to have departed cured.
Overall all countries due to their very different beliefs and practices had very different depths of knowledge about the human body and ideas surrounding medicine have changed greatly over time.
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