How And When Did The Medicine Begin?

For disease medicine is the treatment. There are many ways of treating a disease. The doctor applies his entire skill and knowledge, should some one of the family fall sick and we requisition services of one. He would offer scientific treatment. He might as well depend on a “remedy” your grandmother knew, or he may say some magic words and try to cure an ill person. In this manner the treatment applied is unscientific.

Prescientific stage is also included in the history of medicine, when it was not a science. The medicine of the primitive people had many explanations of disease. In treating disease, primitive medicine depended on magic or on anything that seemed to work. Application of heat and cold was included, surprisingly enough, in the medicine. Bloodletting, massage, the use of herbs was also a part of the medicine.

The medicine of ancient Egyptians which was the best-known, earlier to the scientific medicine, depended chiefly on magic. It used potions and ointments. The drugs included salt, cedar oil, Honey, the brain, liver, heart, and blood of various animals. This prescientific medicine worked wonders at times, while at times it did not.

But it was not until the time of the Greeks that scientific medicine began. A man called Hippocrates put together a collection of medical books, “The Hippocratic collection”. This marked the beginning of scientific medicine. It depended on close Observation of patients for learning about diseases.

Actual cases of what had happened to the patients were recorded. Instead of depending on some magic formula, treatment was given as the result of studying the patients and the disease, and also applying the past experience. In this way, the modern scientific medicine took roots and was born.