Ask the Doc - Eureka At Last A Historical View

EUREKA AT LAST - A HISTORICAL VIEW

No one wants to suffer or to die. That truth is as old as consciousness itself. The shaman’s chants and drums comfort the sick soul, but have little impact on physical diseases. For a thousand centuries the world over, magic was medicine and medicine was magic. Then came Hippocrates, the father of scientific healing.

Around 400BC Hippocrates described the biological courses of all ailments and infirmities, from bladder stones to heart failure. He also established a code that defined the moral responsibilities of ethical practice. His cultural legacy still affects our feelings toward the sanctity of life and the role of physicians. Because Hippocrates influenced western medicine so dramatically, we have to explore his innovations to understand the medical world of today.

Prior to Hippocrates, people understood plagues and illnesses to be punishments for insulting a god. When the gods were angry, sacrifices and spells to appease the irate deities were stock in trade for professional healers. But as the fame of Hippocrates rose, he raised the medical mindset out of its credulous depths once and for all. He dismissed the occult and separated the domain of physicians from the cabal of shamans and soothsayers. His clinical successes as a physician persuaded a primitive world that diseases do have natural causes and will respond to biological cures. His impact on all technological aspects of civilization, not just medicine, is incalculable because Hippocrates was the first to prove that science really works!

Hippocrates understood that disease was the loss of a healthy balance. In the bygone time of superstition, the components of health were mysteries. How do you determine what to do to achieve a healthy balance when the field of chemistry did not even exist, nor microscopes nor x-rays; not even anatomy was understood. No one had ever seen bacteria or viruses or malarial parasites or hemoglobin, let alone glucose or gluten! So Hippocrates developed a system of wellness we call the theory of humors.

To the Greeks, the universe was fabricated from four elements - earth, air, fire and water. All living creatures including humans supposedly were also made from those four elements. The human body’s major fluids were black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm, which hypothetically corresponded to the four physical elements. Illness was an imbalance of the four humors.

This theory of medicine persisted for over two thousand years, right up to almost 1800! Even today the theory of humours is reflected in words that describe personalities, like sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic - testimony to Hippocrates’ enduring influence.

Dr Bill Nielsen has been practising in Duncan for thirty years