Medicine in History: The Ancient Greeks

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Medisch

We can learn a lot about the people of ancient times and their thought processes when we look back at how they used to regard medicine. How practical where they when it came to treatment and how did they think the body worked? In this article we will discuss the Ancient Greeks, who were active from 700 BC until around 600 AD. This spans about 1300 years of history and it was the time of some of the greatest minds in Western history, but some of the things believed to be true were still a little odd.

When we look at the Ancient Greece, we see diversity in ways of thinking regarding health, the body and what caused the ailment. Many would regard the Greeks as the founders of modern medicine with science and cause and effect as the center of treatment. However, this was not the case everywhere. As mentioned before, 1300 years is a long time. There was a bit of a learning curve. What was believed to be the right method of treating a disease might differ on the time period, region, social class and many other factors. Practices might have clashed with each other’s ideas in the same time period. Many Greeks were curious about the inner workings of the world and sought answers in various places. Some found illness to be divine punishment, but more and more curious souls began to search for a different explanation. There were few health and safety regulations at the time, so many practices would be questionable in our eyes to say the least.

Although records show that the first early medical school was started around 700 BC, where they would observe sick patients and learn from them, a medical degree was not a requirement to be a practising doctor. Every quack could hit the road and prescribe patients what they thought was right. This could range from herbs, to prayer and diet changes. Surgery was rarely suggested, outside of war, due to the dangers that it brought with it. They were mainly herbalists.

A popular theory was the theory of the four humors. Hippocrates, maybe the most famous physician of all, is often credited with the development of this theory. This is the theory that the blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm influence the body and emotions of a person. These humors need to be in balance, the right strength, and well mixed for a person to be healthy. For example, too much yellow bile, made by the gallbladder, would cause aggression and too much black, made by the spleen, would cause depression. Hippocrates believed that all these fluids had a different taste. Doctors would learn the tastes of these humors and then could diagnose the imbalance in the patients by, for example, helping themself to the vomit of the sick patient. This seemed like a good idea back then.

Some other weird practices

This was not only done for vomit and other bodily fluids. Maybe one of the more surprising practices was that doctors at the time that followed the same teachings as Hippocrates, would taste your earwax. The reason behind this is already explained. An imbalance in the humors could be tasted that way according to the respected physician.

But this balancing of the fluid went further than the taste of the fluids. If a person was too hot they would have to much blood and yellow bile, as those are the ‘hot’ humors. The cold ones then would be phlegm and black bile. If a person was sweating too much they would have too much “wet” in them. The wet humors were blood and phlegm, and the dry where yellow and black bile. This created a handy chart about wat was wrong. Fever? Hot and wet/sweaty? That would be to much blood.

Thus, an imbalance in the humors would also cause a fever. This was usually the result of too much blood, or bad blood. The cure was quite simple really: bloodletting. Simply removing the excess blood would cure you. Leeches could also be used. This method has been used for several different ailments over the years. For example, blood draining was prescribed as a cure for the plague.

It was all about balance. Is a person warm? Keep them cold. Wet? Keep them dry. Dry? They have too much of the dry humors, so we must give hem laxatives or make them vomit, drying them out more. Their theories didn’t always work out.

They also had different kinds of practices that didn’t involve balance.

If a woman didn’t want to be pregnant there where a couple of things she could do to prevent it, like rubbing honey on her genitalia before the act. Some physicians had more eccentric ideas about birth control. One doctor told women that sneezing would help. After making love, she would have to squat, rinse with water and sneeze. Sneezing probably didn’t contribute that much to the efficacy of this method.

Female medicine and anatomy seemed to be a struggle for physicians at the time. The womb was believed to be a seperate being with its own thoughts. Another famous figure, Plato, described how the womb would detach from the wall and be loose inside the body if the woman didn’t have sex for a prolonged period of time. The womb would be so yearning to bear children that it would try to suffocate the woman, cause seizures, and hysteria. Thus women were told from a young age to marry young and have many children to prevent this from happening. If it still did happen, and the womb broke free, the women could undergo a range of techniques to get the womb back to its place. It could range from taking a bath to having a massage in that region to push the womb back to its position. One could also rub smelling oils between the tights so that the womb would free up and go to its original position. All sound medical practices.

Unfortunately, this was not the extent of the lovely treatment women got at the time. Dirt and other rather unhygienic means were used to treat women. The idea behind this was that women could more easily catch bad spirits and energy and this would result in ailments. In most cases bad smell, could drive out these forces. If a woman had a miscarriage for example, she would have cow feces thrown on her to drive out the bad forces that caused the miscarriage.

This was not the only use for feces in ancient Greek medicine. They also put land crocodile dung on their eyes to help with scars and other skin conditions. But don’t worry, they did mix it with water so it would be easier to spread.

There where a lot on weird and unethical practices they had, similar to other time periods, But they were the creators of modern medicine. Let’s just all be grateful that medicine has advanced since the start and will hopefully continue to do so in the future.