3. Ancient Medicine 2 Flashcards
Who are critics of Greek Medicine
- Cato and Pliny believed in indigenous Italic healings based on herbs, prayers, and charms.
- Cato thought eating outside of local diet causes you to be sick/ was pro-agriculture
- Believed humours were complicated. Saw it as boring and not roman/italic
- They believe relying on doctors means you’re not taking care of yourself.
What made many move to Rome?
- Rome had a big plague, and called for prayers to save the city
- Many types of healers were able to get work there so they were able to flourish
- Rome encouraged this by not making physicians pay taxes
What sicknesses were common in dense cities?
- Fevers, skin diseases, eye diseases, and nutritional disorders
- Smallpox was carried by the Roman army from modern Iraq through Egypt, the Mediterranean, and the Roman Empire
What was the Galenic Corpus
Galen wrote lots and had about 350 works writing about diseases, anatomy, drugs, humours, herbs, surgery, hygiene, diet, prognosis, medical vocab, natural philosophical works on the elements, soul, etc
This is the Galenic Corpus
Why does Philosophy and Medicine illuminate each other as per Galen?
You can’t reason properly if you don’t understand how the world operated, and Galen thinks understanding the elements (water,fire, earth, wind) was essential to understanding the body
-Galen believes you shouldn’t be touching bodies if you don’t understand.
What is the term for “the body invisible to the naked eye”
“Humouralism”
- slight imbalances were natural and normal but illnesses were significant imbalances to your natural balance
What is complexion and temperament?
Coming from the Hippocratic medicine, and developed by Galenic medicine…
individuals had a balance/mixture that needs to be balanced when sick.
Mixtures determine one’s complexion (physical, on the surface), and temperament is the physical well-being/one’s mental state
This also became a hierarchy of how people treated each other (ex: preffered sanguine people over melancholic) refer to diagram on slides
What is Galenic healing?
It is healing through Diagnosis and Therapy.
Diagnosis:
- observe signs and symptoms (Complexion) to know the underlying humoural changes in the body
- Patient history (their narrative, questions, etc). It is important for doctors to listen so they can combine their understanding with a treatment, which patients might not be able to do
- the importance of the pulse
Therapy: determine the proper balance for medicine, the patients, and form a regimen to restore the balance
- Determine the six non-naturals that influence the body’s health
-Drug therapy (simples combined become compounds)
- Surgery is the last resort (phlebotomy-blood letting)
What are the six non-naturals as per Hunayn?
To heal someone and put them back into balance, you must fix these things
- Air (environment): steam, moisture, breeze, etc
- Food and Drink (depending on how they feel, give appropriate food)
- Motion: exercise and rest
- Wake and Sleep
- Retention and Evacuation: Stuff you keep inside and stuff you should expel (pee, poo, sweat, etc)
- The ‘passions of the mind’: Mental health, healing the mind
What is the idea behind Galenic Body?
-Difference is complexional (determines body type male/female)
- Male and female bodies have certain attributes (ex: males are hot and dry, females are wet and cold) changes in attributes could be due to changing climates, reproductive partner, etc
What is the Greco-Roman medicine?
- linked body with nature
- has convincing hypotheses about invisible structure in the body
- argued for individualistic bodies
- changes in humour combinations lead to illness
- offered hypothesis on how mixtures get thrown out of balance
- health is relative and physicians have to figure out the distinctive humours
- Galenic methods were able to provide responses with great explanatory power hence why this method lasted a long time. 19th century physicians completely reject this understandings but comparisons are made.
