Month: September 2019

Empiricism was not an invention of the Renaissance, but it breathed life into it. The obvious idea of the importance of knowledge derived from experience has been found in the works of ancient philosophers before, but has never been truly influential. Perhaps the reason was that such a philosophy is not compatible with the existence of hidden and unknowable gods-the measure of any truth and the source of any knowledge. It took a later Revival, with its spirit of freedom and the gradual diminution of the role of religion, for empiricism to resound in full force. His voice was sir Francis bacon, a distinguished scholar, philosopher and statesman. Living XVI–XVII century in Britain bacon was one of the most extraordinary people of his time. He received an excellent legal education,…

How could a huge industry have offered almost exclusively ineffective drugs and procedures for thousands of years? There were several reasons, but a significant role was played by the selection of treatment by logical reasoning, the starting point for which was a mistaken understanding of the body, the mechanisms of the disease and the principles of action of certain substances. Cognition is a sequential process, it is impossible to jump over a few steps. To understand the causes of fever, you need to at least know about the existence of microorganisms. And this is impossible until the microscope is created. The creation of the microscope should be preceded by the development of optics and the emergence of technologies to create lenses of the desired strength and quality. Then you need…

Perhaps none of the methods of treatment was so popular and did not take so many lives as bloodletting. Curiously, it was practiced in different eras, in different parts of the world and cultures, by magicians and secular doctors. Bloodletting for more than three millennia. The first mention in ancient Egyptian papyri refers to the second Millennium BC. Bloodletting was used in Ayurvedic medicine of ancient India, where almost all its varieties were used: dissection of veins, blood banks, leeches and even therapeutic flagellation to the blood. Acupuncture, which originated in China and spread around the world, also probably originates from a bloodier procedure and has only recently been transformed into the now bloodless variant. Bloodletting was done by the Indians of pre-Columbian America, tribes in Africa and Northern Australia,…

With the fall of the Roman Empire, Christianity began to supplant Greco-Roman culture. The new religion destroyed the old temples and took control of all aspects of the life of the flock, from birth to death. The secular medicine of antiquity have faded into the background. Christianity was not only a religion of salvation, but also a religion of healing. Most of the miracles performed by Jesus and Christian saints were of a medical nature. Jesus treated blindness, deafness, paralysis, leprosy, dropsy, and other diseases that are difficult to identify. In all, the New Testament mentions thirty-one cases of cure. Many Christian saints specialized in the treatment of certain diseases. To St. Anthony and asked for deliverance from erysipelas, for St. Vitus – from chorea, St. Roch, from the bubonic…

If Hippocrates helped medicine become a profession, and the Alexandrians showed that it can and should do research, then marketing taught her Galen-a man whose talent for PR was at least as much as his talent as a doctor. Galen was born in the II century, now our era, in one of the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire in the family of a wealthy and educated architect. At the insistence of his father, the son began to study the art of medicine and traveled a lot, learning from different teachers. Galen had enough money to put off his practice and spend many years studying – making him one of the most educated doctors of his time. Only in thirty one year he finally arrived in Rome and began work…

Although Hippocrates's ideas were one of the first attempts to create a model of health and disease without the involvement of supernatural forces, his contemporaries did not take the step that now seems natural to us – did not hurry to get the knowledge that lay only at a distance of a knife blade, hidden under the skin. Ancient doctors did not dissect corpses; the source of their ideas about the internal structure were the few autopsies of animals and observations of deep cavity wounds. There were several reasons for this. First, in Ancient Greece, and then in Ancient Rome, there was a ban on the opening of the human body. A dead body was considered unclean, and anyone who came into contact with it had to undergo a long…

Thanks to the emergence of writing about medicine ancient Mesopotamia we know much more, than about priests prehistoric civilizations. Cuneiform clay tablets brought to us information about both the healers and the medicines they used, including methods of manufacture and prescriptions for use. It is in Mesopotamia that the first division of the ancient profession known to us is planned into two: the priests who exorcised evil spirits were engaged in health, and the doctors – manufacturers of drugs. But the line between the two types of medicine was blurred: treatment was always accompanied by prayers that were supposed to give the drugs strength. Medicines were prepared from plants and minerals, and despite many different formulations, almost all of them were useless. The exceptions were two herbal painkillers: opium and…

Magical ideas about the causes of the disease dictate the appropriate methods of treatment. If the disease can move into the body, why not try to force or cunning to drive it out of the patient? Historians and ethnographers have documented in detail the incredible ingenuity with which mankind has tried to move the disease to another, more appropriate place. Almost any objects, plants or animals could become the new receptacle of the disease. The ancient Egyptians put pork to their sick eyes, so that evil spirits moved there. For the same reasons, migraine was treated by applying fish heads to its head. The weakened inhabitants of the Moluccas beat themselves with stones, which they then threw away, believing that the weakness had moved from the suffering body to the…

One of the main myths of medicine is that it was invented by human civilization. In fact, it appeared long before us. We will never know who was the first living creature to resort to natural medicines, or what social animal first helped rid another member of its species of parasites. But we can be sure that this behavior contributed to survival, and therefore was fixed in the process of natural selection. Now we can observe both self-treatment and medical mutual assistance in a variety of animals starting with relatively simple insects. Infected fly larvae caterpillars of butterflies of mole crickets eat the leaves that contain toxic alkaloids. And, apparently, the drug is quite effective: this behavior increases the chances of caterpillars to survive. And fruit flies infected with rider…