Medicine

Abstract

The history of ancient medicine depends largely on two blocks of written material. One, loosely called the Hippocratic Corpus, dates mainly from 450 to 350 bce, and the second, dominated by Galen, dates from the 2nd century ce. Traces of medical ideas and practices outside these dates are few, and must be supplemented by literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence. Early medicine is described in the Homeric poems and in fragments of pre-Socratic philosophy, and already exhibits a detailed empiricism coupled with a high degree of speculation. The vigorous debates in the Hippocratic Corpus mark ancient medicine off from that of many other cultures. The Roman takeover of the Greek world from the 3rd century bce brought Greek medicine westwards, and made Rome a new centre of medical debate on a par with Hellenistic Alexandria. Doctors like Soranus and Galen migrated there. Galen, in particular, became so influential as an imperial physician, a philosopher, an observer, an anatomist, and a champion of the theory of the four humours, that much later medicine down to the 16th century followed his ideas and helped to marginalize alternative views to his. The vibrant medical culture of Rome and Alexandria became a near-monolithic Galenism.