Make a habit of two things – to help, or at least, to do no harm.
Hippocrates of Kos
Ancient Greek “Father or medicine”
Welcome to the history of Medicine
What is medicine?
Medicine is all about diagnosing, treating and preventing diseases.
Diagnosing: finding out what’s wrong.
Treating: fixing it.
Preventing: stopping it from happening in the first place!
Everyone gets sick or injured sometimes. As long as people have been people, we’ve been looking for ways to make ourselves feel better when that happens.
The “Father of Medicine”
People have used healers for thousands of years, but the first one that we really know anything about is an ancient Greek called Hippocrates of Kos.
Hippocrates is pronounced Hip-Ock-Rat-Eez
Hippocrates realised that collecting information would help to understand diseases. He also said that how people lived, what they ate and how much exercise they did could affect how healthy they were.
This might seem obvious to us now, but 2500 years ago this was big news. People didn’t really understand that there could be a connection between how you lived and how often you got sick.
Even today, new doctors have to take the “Hippocratic oath”, where they swear to use their skills to help people, and not to make them any worse!
Meet a Roman Healer
What can this Roman doctor do to help his patients?
The Four Humours
The Greeks and Romans believed that the body was made up of four humours, that were linked to the four elements. If you had too much of one humour, and not enough of another, your body was out of balance and you would be ill. The best way to cure illness was to get the body back in balance by adjusting the amounts of humour.
Too much of each humour could cause you to be:
Red Blood – over excited, greedy
Yellow bile – bad tempered and grumpy
Black bile – sad and depressed
Phlegm – sluggish and dull
Doctors started to change their minds in the mid 1500s, realising that the theory of four humours was incorrect. But some doctors believed this to be true right up to the 17th Century!
Anglo Saxon Medicine
A Laech is an Anglo Saxon healer. Here she is, telling you about some of the remedies used in Anglo Saxon times, just after the Romans left Britain.
Meet a Physic
Meet a real Tudor Physic and help him decide how to treat his patients.
So, What did you think?
Now that you’ve learned about three kinds of doctors from the past 2000 years, what can you say about their medicine?
What was similar and what was different about what they did?
Did they use science or were they just guessing?
Do you think their cures worked?
What do you think could make a difference to how they treated their patients?
Why do you think we do things differently now?
Anatomy
Anatomy means the study of the body and how it is put together.
For hundreds of years, the way people learned about the body was by cutting up dead ones.
Because of their religion, Roman doctors weren’t allowed to cut up dead people, so they had to do their best with dead animals and guess the rest. Maybe that explains why they got a lot of things wrong!
Once people were allowed to really study the human body, they found all kinds of amazing things, like how blood circulated and how the lungs worked.
You can study some anatomy by making a hand. Your hand works through a system of muscles and tendons, which pull on your bones to move your fingers. Watch the video here to see how you can make a working hand with its own tendons. It’s a lot less messy than cutting up a dead one!
Find the words
Strange things!
Doctors have used many strange objects over the years to help cure people. Can you guess what some of these might be used for?
Make a plague doctor mask
In the 17th Century a deadly disease swept through Europe. It was called the Bubonic Plague.
A bubo was a swelling, and the victim would break out in huge swellings all over their body.
Doctors treating the victims believed that they could be protected from the plague by wearing a special mask filled with herbs to keep the bad air, or miasma, away.
As the plague was actually spread by bites from infected fleas, the masks didn’t actually do anything – but they did look great!
You can make your own plague doctor mask here:
