The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800

by Albert H. Buck

Fifth Epoch: The medicine of the period during which the centre of greatest intellectual activity was located at Alexandria, Egypt.

Sixth Epoch: The medicine of Galen—an author whose teachings exerted a preponderating influence upon the thought and practice of physicians in every part of the civilized world up to the seventeenth century of the Christian era. This period is also characterized by the gradual diminution of the influence of Greek medicine.

Seventh Epoch: The medicine of the Middle Ages—a period which includes a large part of the preceding epoch. Its most characteristic feature is the important part played by the Arabs in moulding the teachings and practice of the medical men of that time (ninth to fifteenth century).

Eighth Epoch (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries): The medicine of the Renaissance period—characterized chiefly by the adoption of the only effective method of studying the anatomy of man—the actual dissection of human bodies.

Ninth Epoch (from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present time): Modern medicine.—This epoch may with advantage be divided into two periods—the first extending to about the year 1775, soon after which time Jenner began his important work on the subject of vaccination; and the second to the present time. No attempt will be made in the following account to cover this second period.

The Beginnings of Medicine.—In the early period of man’s existence upon this earth he must have possessed an exceedingly small stock of knowledge with regard to the maintenance of his body in health and with regard to the means which he should adopt in order to restore it to a normal condition after it had been injured by violence or impaired in its working machinery by disease. With the progress of time, utilizing his powers of observation and his reasoning faculty, he slowly made additions to his stock of facts of this nature. Thus, for example, he gradually learned that cold, under certain circumstances, is competent to produce pain in the chest, shortness of breath, active secretion of mucus, etc., and his instinct led him, when he became affected in this manner, to crave the local application of heat as a means of affording relief from these distressing symptoms. Again, when he used certain plants as food he could scarcely fail to note the facts that some of them produced a refreshing or cooling effect, that others induced a sensation of warmth, and finally that others still, by reason of their poisonous properties, did actual harm. Sooner or later, such phenomena as nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea would also be attributed by him to their true causes. In due course of time his friends and neighbors, having made similar observations and having tried various remedial procedures for the relief of their bodily ills, would come together and compare with him their several experiences; and so eventually the fact would be brought out that the particular method adopted by one of their number for the relief of certain symptoms had proved more effective than any of the others. Thus gradually this isolated community or tribe of men must have learned how to treat, more or less successfully, the simpler ills to which they were liable.

Lucien Le Clerc quotes from the Arab historian Ebn Abi Ossaïbiah the following account of the manner in which bloodletting probably first came to be adopted as a remedial measure:—

Let us suppose that in the earliest period of man’s history somebody experienced the need of the medical art. He may, for example, have felt a general sense of heaviness in his body (plethora), associated perhaps with redness of the eyes, and he probably did not know what he should do in order to obtain relief from these sensations. Then, when his trouble was at its worst, his nose began to bleed, and the bleeding continued until he experienced decided relief from his discomfort. In this way he learned an important fact, and cherished it in his memory.

On a later occasion he experienced once more the same sense of heaviness, and he lost no time in scratching the interior of his nose in order to provoke a return of the bleeding. The nosebleed thus excited again gave him entire relief from the unpleasant sensations, and upon the first convenient occasion he told his children and all his relatives about the successful results obtained from this curative procedure. Little by little this simple act, which was a first step in the healing art, developed into the intelligently and skilfully performed operation of venesection.

Primitive man also increased his stock of knowledge in the healing art by reading attentively the book of nature,—i.e., by observing how animals, when ill, eat the leaves or stems of certain plants and thus obtain relief from their disorders. The virtues of a species of origanum, as an antidote for poisoning from the bite of a snake, were revealed, it is asserted, by the observation that turtles, when bitten by one of these reptiles, immediately seek for the plant in question and, after feeding upon it, experience no perceptible ill effects from the poisonous bite. The natives of India ascribe the discovery of the remarkable virtues of snakeroot (the bitter root of the ophiorrhiza Mungos) as an antidote for poisoning by the bite of a snake, to the ichneumon, a small animal of the rat species. The instinctive desire to escape pain taught man, as it does the lower animals, to keep a fractured limb at rest, thus giving the separated ends of the bone an opportunity to reunite; after which the limb eventually becomes as strong as it ever was. Simple as this mode of acquiring useful medical knowledge may appear to us moderns, there are good reasons for believing that hundreds of years must have elapsed before the accumulated stock of such experiences became really considerable. On the other hand, it is reasonable to suppose that this growth in medical knowledge took place more rapidly in certain tribes or races than in others, and that when, under the action of wars, the inferior men became tributary to those of greater intellectual powers, they acquired, through contact with their conquerors, additional knowledge at a much more rapid rate. One great hindrance, however, stood in the way of such progress. I refer to the deeply rooted belief, entertained by man in this primitive period of his existence, in the agency of malevolent spirits (demons) in the production of disease,—a belief which continued to exist for many thousands of years. Out of such a belief developed the necessity of discovering some practical method of appeasing the evil spirits and of thus obtaining the desired cure of the ills of the body. Usually some member of the tribe who had displayed special skill in the treatment of disease, and who at the same time was liberally endowed with the qualities which characterize the charlatan, was chosen to be the priest or “medicine man.” It was his duty to employ measures suitable for expelling the demon from the patient’s body and for restoring the latter to health. Possessing great influence, as these superstitious people believed he did, with the unseen gods, such a physician-priest must have discouraged all efforts to increase the stock of genuine medical knowledge; for such an increase would necessarily mean a diminution of his own power and influence.