Ancient Greek Medicine
Disease was a very serious problem for the Greeks, as for all other people in the ancient and medieval worlds. One out of three babies died before they were a year old. Half of all children died before they were ten. And even most people who grew up died in their forties and fifties.
So the Greeks were very interested in using scientific observation and logic to figure out what caused diseases and what you could do about them. In the 300's BC and afterward, in the Hellenistic period, Greek doctors worked out a logical system for understanding disease. Their writings about this have been collected in the Hippocratic Writings, named after the first and most famous of these doctors, Hippocrates (hih-POH-krat-ees).
A leech
This logical system began with the idea of humors.
The doctors believed that people were made out of four substances: blood,
black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm (pronounced FLEM) (means boogers).
If you were healthy, that was because your four humors were balanced.
You had the right amount of each one. But if you had too much of one
humor, you would be unbalanced and you would feel ill. For instance,
if you had too much blood, that would give you a fever. So your medical
treatment should be to reduce the amount of blood in your body. Greek
doctors did this by cutting your arm until blood ran out. This was supposed
to help bring down your fever. Or they put leeches on your arm to suck
the extra blood out. They did this so often that doctors were sometimes
called "leeches". And they thought it was such a good idea that doctors
were still letting blood about 150 years ago!
Greek doctors also believed that some climates tended to increase the amount of some humors in your body. If you lived in a wet, cold climate, that would tend to increase the amount of phlegm, for instance. One treatment might be to move to a drier, warmer climate to balance out your humors again.
These ideas are all wrong, but the idea that Hippocrates had, that you could learn to understand and treat diseases by using careful observation and logical thought, is very important to modern medicine.
To find out more about Greek medicine, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Greek and Roman Science, by Don Nardo (1998). Nardo has written a lot of good books about the ancient world for kids; this one is no exception.
Hippocratic Writings, by Hippocrates and others. Translated by G.E.R. Lloyd. What the Greeks themselves had to say about medical theory and practice.
Hippocrates, by Jacques Jouanna and M. B. Devevoise (1999). A commentary on the Hippocratic writings and Greek medicine in general, for adults.
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