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History Of Western Medicine > Ancient Greek And Roman Medicine > Flashcards

Ancient Greek And Roman Medicine Flashcards

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1
Q

Who were the hippocratic physicians?

A

-They were a sect of healers that followed the ideas of Hippocrates of Cos
-Dates: 450-370 BCE

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2
Q

Why did the Hippocratics and other Greek physicians want to be regarded as philosophers?

A

-set a basis of trust (people trusted philosophers)
-‘Ideal citizen’ is competent in philosophy
-Philosophical skills involve observation and reasoned argument

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3
Q

How did Greek philosophical medicine relate to religous healing?

A
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4
Q

What was humoural healing? How did it explain health and illness?

A

-Treatments designed to restore the proper humoural balance by bloodletting, vomit, enemas and other purges.
-If unwell the humours were unbalanced

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5
Q

What did prognosis mean to Greek physicians and their patients?

A

The likely course of a medical condition

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6
Q

Why was prognosis such an important skill?

A

Proved to people that their healing was real. People then trusted the healers and their treatments

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7
Q

Who was Galen?

A
  • Sees himself as the inheritor of the hippocratic tradition
  • Embodies the hippocratic ideals of learning and rationality
  • Developed own literacy corpus, based on hippocratic theory and his own observations
  • Seeks to advance hippocratic theory by developing a theory of how the organs works
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8
Q

Why did Galen have such an impact on medicine?

A
  • Used dissection (on animals) as a way of research
  • Discovered that there are two blood systems, being venous (nutritious, growth) and arterial (animal functions, eg movement and sensitivity)
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9
Q

What functions did Galen attribute to the blood and the heart?

A
  • function of the heart is to nourish the lungs (different type of vein)
  • claimed liver produced blood and was distributed in a centifugal manner
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10
Q

What was the plague of Athens? Symptoms?

A
  • Occurred in 430-429 BC
  • Symptoms included: redness and inflammation of the eyes, heats in the head, parts such as throat and the tongue became blood + bad breath, cough and sneezing
  • Started just above Egypt then moved down
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11
Q

What were epidemics in the ancient world?

A
  • Narratives of individual, social and moral decay
  • Epidemics are not simply the accumulation of individual cases
  • Epidemics are not caused by external agents
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12
Q

What were the four humours?

A

Blood
yellow bile
black bile
phlegm

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13
Q

What are the four humours affected by?

A

Changes of season - colds more common in winter, diarrhoea in summer
Changes of place - moving from one climate to another

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14
Q

What mainly caused the growth of disease?

A
  • Restricted diet increases susceptibility to disease
  • human population density increases epidemic disease
  • contagion, droplet infection ion
  • water polluted with faeces (polio. Cholera, typhoid and viral hepatitis)
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15
Q

Which main animals carried disease? What did they spread?

A

Cattle - tuberculosis and viral poxes
Pigs and fowl - influenza
Horses - rhinoviruses (common cold)
Dogs, cats, hens and reptiles - salmonella

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16
Q

What is the law code of Hammurabi (Babylon)? Date?

A
  • Specialisation of occupation
  • Fees paid to healers
  • Penalties for failure to cure
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17
Q

What was healing in Egypt?

A
  • Healing was a practical art that did not need to be written. It was passed down through word of mouth
    -Egypt had a well developed tradition of healing practises and many herbs were used (eg herbs preserved in tombs)
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18
Q

Why do we have little knowledge of medical aspects of these cultures?

A
  • Writing was a rare skill
  • papyrus (paper) availability was rare
  • Little reason to record knowledge, knowledge passed down orally or through practise
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19
Q

How does religion play a part in political power?

A

Rulers claimed the gods approval or that themselves were gods. And so, like the gods, they could do what they wanted

20
Q

What was the Greek government like?

A

A democracy - a distinct form of government based on the rule of each city state and by its citizens (particularly in Athens)
Not including women and peasants

21
Q

What did Socrates, plato and Aristotle develop?

A

Rationalistic analyses of the nature of society and of proper social conduct

22
Q

What does philosophical knowledge NOT appeal to?

A

Supernatural powers or agencies to explain or justify social action

23
Q

What is the ideal citizen competent in?

A

Philosophy:
-philosophical identity as a basis of trust

24
Q

What did Greek philosophy say about the natural world?

A
  • natural world is not usually arbitrary, gods and spirits do not usually intervene
  • nature can be understood through philosophical inquiry and investigation
25
Q

How did healers appeal to customers?

A
  • became expert in particular practises such as midwives, root cutters, surgeons, practitioners of ritual purification
  • represented themselves as philosophers
26
Q

What do we know about Hippocrates?

A
  • know very little
  • 450-370 BCE
  • renowned healer that lived on the island of Cos
  • passed on knowledge for free
27
Q

What are the hippocratic principles?

A
  • health and illness must be explained naturally and rationally, same for the facts of medical treatment
  • rejected explanations that invoke supernatural causes (eg divine punishment)
  • accepted that illness may sometimes be inflicted by god
28
Q

What are the two sets of opposed fundamental properties?

A

Hot and cold
Dry and wet

29
Q

What are the four elements?

A

Fire, earth, water, air

30
Q

What are all natural things formed of?

A

Four elements in different proportions

31
Q

What state is the cosmos in? What does this mean?

A

State of flux - the constant shifting of mixtures explains the change in the natural world

32
Q

How does the humours in each individual determines person constitution?
(Sex, age and environment)

A

Sex:
-women are cold and wet
-men are hot and dry
Age:
-young are sanguine
-old are phlegmatic
Environment:
-Libyans are dark, hot and vigorous
-Ukrainians are pale and phlegmatic

33
Q

What did the empirics focus on?

A

Thought we cannot know the ultimate nature and cause of things. Instead focused on what can be learned from experience
Eg what treatments work best for what kinds of illness?

34
Q

What did Methodists base their ideas of disease/treatment on?

A
  • Theory of atoms and how they move through the pores of the body
  • Health and illness depends on the pores being in an appropriate condition
  • medical treatment intended to correct excessive tension or laxity of the pores
35
Q

What theory did Galen adopt?

A

Platonic theory of a tripartite

36
Q

What did physicians do to help diagnose an individual?

A
  • Observation and limited physical examination
  • Listening and questioning
  • Reasoning
37
Q

What is prognosis? Why is it important?

A
  • prognosis is the likely course of a medical condition
  • provides a mean to secure a patients trust
  • gives the patient something to judge the physician off of
  • physicians can avoid hopeless cases
38
Q

What are the aims of Hippocratic treatments?

A
  • assist natural balancing of the humours
  • using gentle treatments (drastic measures if need be)
  • knowing when NOT to treat
39
Q

What were epidemics historically?

A
  • multiple occurrence of disease constrained by place and time
  • no consideration of cause or transmission based on pathogens
40
Q

What did Thucydides do?

A
  • Wrote ‘the plague of Athens’
  • Was a historian and a general (NOT a physician)
41
Q

Symptoms of the plague of Athens

A
  • heats in the head
  • redness and inflammation in the eyes
  • sneezing
    -cough
  • spasms
42
Q

What was the significance of the plague of Athens?

A
  • unique epidemic event
  • dramatic effects on individuals, the population, economics, the war and antiquity
    -invention of the epidemic description (Thucydides)
  • first recorded epidemic event in western medicine
  • image of individual, social and moral decay
43
Q

How did Thucydides think of doctors during the plague of Athens?

A

Useless

44
Q

What was in the 7 books written on hippocratic medicine?

A
  • case notes
  • descriptions of disease and illness
  • no discussion of contagion or transmission
  • highly individualistic
45
Q

What does krisis, Pepsis and apostasies mean?

A

Krisis - the crisis of the disease
Pepsis - ripening of the diseases substance
Apostasies - evacuation of harmful substances

46
Q

What are the main points of epidemics in antiquity?

A
  • narratives of individual, social and moral decay
  • epidemics are not simply the accumulation of individual cases
  • not caused by external agents / pathogens

History Of Western Medicine (2 decks)

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