History of medicine

Prehistoric medicine incorporated plants (herbalism), animal parts and minerals. In many cases these materials were used ritually as magical substances by priests, shamans, or medicine men. Well-known spiritual systems include animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits), spiritualism (an appeal to gods or communion with ancestor spirits); shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers); anddivination (magically obtaining the truth). The field of medical anthropology examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or impacted by issues of health, health care and related issues.

Statuette of ancient Egyptian physician Imhotep, the first physician from antiquity known by name.

An ancient Greek patient gets medical treatment: this aryballos (circa480-470 BCE, now in Paris's Louvre Museum) probably contained healing oil

The Greek physicianHippocrates (ca. 460 BCE – ca. 370 BCE), considered the father of medicine.^[3][4]

The Greek physician Hippocrates, the "father of medicine",^[4][9] laid the foundation for a rational approach to medicine. Hippocrates introduced the Hippocratic Oath for physicians, which is still relevant and in use today, and was the first to categorize illnesses as acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic, and use terms such as, "exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, peak, andconvalescence".^[10][11]Early records on medicine have been discovered from ancient Egyptian medicine, Babylonian medicine, Ayurvedic medicine (in the Indian subcontinent), classical Chinese medicine (predecessor to the modern traditional Chinese Medicine), and ancient Greek medicine and Roman medicine. The Egyptian Imhotep (3rd millennium BC) is the first physician in history known by name. Earliest records of dedicated hospitals come from Mihintale in Sri Lanka where evidence of dedicated medicinal treatment facilities for patients are found.^[5][6] The Indian surgeon Sushruta described numerous surgical operations, including the earliest forms of plastic surgery.^{[7][dubious – discuss][8]}

The Greek physician Galen was also one of the greatest surgeons of the ancient world and performed many audacious operations, including brain and eye surgeries. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the Early Middle Ages, the Greek tradition of medicine went into decline in Western Europe, although it continued uninterrupted in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

After 750 CE, the Muslim world had the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Sushruta translated into Arabic, and Islamic physicians engaged in some significant medical research. Notable Islamic medical pioneers include the polymath, Avicenna, who, along with Imhotep and Hippocrates, has also been called the "father of medicine".^[12][13] He wrote The Canon of Medicine, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine.^[14] Others include Abulcasis,^[15] Avenzoar,^[16] Ibn al-Nafis,^[17] and Averroes.^[18] Rhazes^[19] was one of first to question the Greek theory of humorism, which nevertheless remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine.^[20]The Islamic Bimaristan hospitals were an early example of public hospitals.^[21][22]

However, the fourteenth and fifteenth century Black Death was just as devastating to the Middle East as to Europe, and it has even been argued that Western Europe was generally more effective in recovering from the pandemic than the Middle East.^[23] In the early modern period, important early figures in medicine and anatomy emerged in Europe, including Gabriele Falloppio and William Harvey.

The major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection, especially during the Black Death in the 14th and 15th centuries, of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was paralleled by a similar shift in European society in general - see Copernicus's rejection ofPtolemy's theories on astronomy). Physicians like Vesalius improved upon or disproved some of the theories from the past.

Andreas Vesalius was an author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica.^[24] French surgeon Ambroise Paré is considered as one of the fathers of surgery. Bacteria and microorganisms were first observed with a microscope by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, initiating the scientific field microbiology.^[25] Partly based on the works by the Italian surgeon and anatomist Matteo Realdo Colombo the English physician William Harvey described the circulatory system.^[26] Herman Boerhaave is sometimes referred to as a "father of physiology" due to his exemplary teaching in Leiden and textbook 'Institutiones medicae' (1708). It is said that the 17th century French physician Pierre Fauchardstarted dentistry science as we know it today, and he has been named "the father of modern dentistry".^[27]

Veterinary medicine was for the first time truly separated from human medicine in 1761, when the french veterinarian Claude Bourgelat founded the world's first veterinary school in Lyon, France. Before this, medical doctors treated both humans and animals.

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