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); and divination (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.

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. Earliest records of dedicated hospitals come from Mihintale in Sri Lanka where evidence of dedicated medicinal treatment facilities for patients are found.^[4][5]

Early Greek doctor Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine,^[6][7] laid the foundation for a rational approach to medicine. Hippocrates invented 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, and convalescence"^[8][9]. The Greek physician Galen was one of the greatest surgeons of the ancient world and performed many audacious operations —including brain and eye surgeries— that were not tried again for almost two millennia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages, the Greek tradition of medicine went into decline in Western Europe, although it continued uninterrupted in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.

After 750, the Muslim Arab world had Hippocrates' and Galen's works translated into Arabic, and Islamic physicians engaged in some significant medical research. Notable Islamic medical pioneers include polymath Avicenna, who, along with Hippocrates, has also been called the Father of Medicine,^[10][11] Abulcasis, the father of surgery, Avenzoar, the father of experimental surgery, Ibn al-Nafis, the father of circulatory physiology, and Averroes.^[12] Rhazes, who is called the father of pediatrics, was one of first to question the Greek theory of humorism, which nevertheless remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine.^[13] However, overall mortality and morbidity levels in the medieval Middle East and medieval Europe did not significantly differ one from the other, which indicates that there was no major medical "breakthrough" to modern medicine in either region in this period. 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.^[14] In the early modern period, important early figures in medicine and anatomy emerged in Europe, including Gabriele Falloppio and William Harvey.