Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

Medical science in the 21^st century is pretty impressive stuff. Hi-tech diagnostic tools give doctors a fair idea of what ails the patient, and the range of available treatments seems to be growing by the day. Many conditions that were fatal only a few years ago can now be controlled. No wonder doctors are so highly esteemed in modern society.

Modern medicine has saved countless lives, with most people experiencing no ill-effects from visiting their doctor, and the majority of them feeling very much better for it. But it wasn't always like that.

In ancient times, sickness was associated with supernatural influences. Diseases were blamed on witchcraft, demonic possession and the gods, and “cures” were just as imaginative—and, presumably, non-existent—as the supposed cause. The Phoenicians and pre-Columbians, for example, sacrificed children to the Gods to ward off illness, though they likely accomplished little more than the ritual murder of their own future.

Death, and what—if anything—might happen afterwards, has always fascinated mankind. Many early civilizations developed elaborate myths featuring the unwelcome return of those who had already vacated the land of the living, frequently in the form of
blood-crazed vampires bent on draining every last drop from their still-living successors.

In 1^st - 6^th century Etruscan society, even the living had an interest in consuming the blood of others. For example, the blood or livers of dead gladiators—considered sacred in Etruscan funeral rites—were thought to cure epileptics. (The apparent effectiveness of the approach may have been enhanced by the fact that spontaneous recovery is possible in some forms of epilepsy.)

In fact, a grisly interest in death and blood is a common thread that runs through much early “medicine.” Priests were the gatekeepers to eternity in many societies, ushering the recently deceased into the afterlife and, in some cases, hastening their departure, so it isn't too surprising that they took an interest in what makes a body work—and stop working.

Ancient Egyptian priests, for example, acquired an impressive knowledge of anatomy while removing internal organs during the mummification process. However, this commendable scientific curiosity (what else could drive them to pull the deceased's brains out through the nose with a hook?) didn't stop them from adding a hefty genital prosthesis to each mummy, so their client could enjoy a ‘healthy’ sex life in the afterlife.

Superstition gradually gave way to early science, and, by the 1st Dynasty, Egypt is said to have established medical institutions called “Houses of Life”. In turn, Egyptian medicine influenced the ancient Greeks, and led to the science developed by Galen, a famous surgeon, and Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine. Hippocrates recommended frequent sex, and suggested Myrrh and Frankincense boiled in sweet wine as a treatment for the inevitable sexual infections, which he believed to have originated in Asia.

Hippocrates believed blood to be one of the four humors (the others being phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Bloodletting—as popular with the Greeks as it was with the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Aztecs and Mayans - was based on the process of menstruation, which was thought to purge women of bad humors. The Greeks passed this practice on to Islamic and Ayurvedic medicine, and it remained popular for many centuries. In the 19^th Century, for example, the French imported 40 million leeches per year and the British six million from France, for the express purpose of sucking out patients' blood—perhaps there was something in those ancient vampire myths after all!

The Romans subsequently integrated much of ancient Greek medicine into their society, although the transition was far from smooth—ancient Rome was said to be a “city where superstition interpreted every thing.” The Greeks' early attempts at scientific medicine were unpopular with traditional Roman physicians like Cato, who accused them of poisoning the sick, although his own belief in cabbage as a universal remedy, and his attempts to cure dislocations with incantations and the sacrifice of a white sparrow, are unlikely to have enhanced the reputation of Roman medicine.

Medicine has come a long way in the last few thousand years, and its practitioners can be justifiably proud of the transition from superstition to science. Gone are the wool-soaked-in-vinegar contraceptives, the medicines based on onions, hippopotamus fat and fried rice, the lizard dung poultices and the boiled bodies of dead prostitutes dissected and studied by Rabbi Ishmael in the first century AD. In their place are a working knowledge of the causes of disease, effective cures and workable prevention strategies that our ancestors could only have dreamed of.

But the journey of discovery is only just beginning. Current research offers tantalizing hints of a future packed with medical marvels—like that from Philadelphia's Wistar Institute, which suggests that, eventually, humans might be able to re-grow lost or damaged body parts, like some amphibians do today. With capabilities like that on the radar, it won't be long before today's high-tech medicine seems just as primitive as Cato's cabbage cure-all.