Name: Ancient & Medieval Medicine: Crash Course History of Science #9
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:22:32.000Z
Duration: 12 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We've seen how, from around 400 BCE to CE 1300, ideas in astronomy, math, and engineering

were traded all the way from Beijing to Delhi, and from Baghdad to Constantinople.

In the next episodes, we're going to dive into how some specific kinds of knowledge

The history of medicine is about two of our big questions: one, what is life?

What makes it so special, so fragile, so… goopy!?

It may be tempting to look at medicine as a science that has simply progressed over

time—that medicine used to be bad, and its history is a story of how it got better.

And don't get me wrong: we love modern medicine!

You'll have to take my word for it until “Crash Course: Deep-Fried Everything”

drops, but the science behind lipid transport is just fascinating.

Focusing on progress, though, obscures what worked in the past.

Ancient and medieval medicine worked for millions of people.

They understood their bodies as bounded by rules.

And regardless of what worked, early medical systems allowed people to make sense of bodies

You may think that medicine is a technē, or practically oriented knowledge.

But today, we're going to focus on systems of medicine as world-ordering theories, or

These theories were built up into a textual tradition, in which doctors wrote down what

they saw and cited earlier doctors when explaining their treatments.

What textbooks would a would-be doctor read in a given place and time?

Let's say you lived in Song Dynasty China: you'd study machine-printed textbooks on

In this system, humans are small pieces of one vast organism called the Entire Dang Universe.

All things within this system are composed of five elements: fire, earth, metal, water,

In TCM, health means a balance between two forces, yin and yang, representing dark and

light, femininity and masculinity, hot and cold, and so on.

Thus healthcare means restoring balance, in TCM, by manipulating the energy that flows

You, the would-be doc, would learn all about how to move qi around using acupuncture and

acupressure, herbal therapies, exercise, and prescription diets.

If you lived in Gupta Dynasty India, you'd also get down with a five-element theory of

But you would study the science of life, Ayurveda.

You'd probably pick up the popular textbook Charaka Samhita, or one of the other samhita—or

“collections”—that could help you memorize hundreds of named body parts.

In addition to anatomy, the samhitas would also teach you etiology, or what causes different

diseases, and symptomatology, or what diseases look like.

When it came to treatment, your samhita would have information on the eight specialites:

the diseases of children, those of the elderly, mental diseases, diseases of the sense organs,

surgery, poisons and antidotes, and aphrodisiacs.

You would learn the five karmas or actions that were used for removal of toxins from

And, to prepare treatments, you'd learn a lot about plants, minerals, and animals.

But treating patients is only part of Ayurveda.

The science of life concerns healthful living in general, including how to prevent disease

What if you lived in, say, fourteenth-century Bologna, Italy—home to one of the oldest

universities in the world, which opened in CE 1088!

You would attend lectures, and you'd have a hand-copied textbook, not made by a press

The medical theories in your textbook would be founded on Aristotelian biology and physics.

Bodies are composed of four special bodily humors.

Each of these corresponds to one of the four elements of Empedocles: blood, made of air,

phlegm, made of water, yellow bile, made of fire, and black bile, made of earth.

Too much black bile, for example, causes depression.

Treatment means restoring the right humoral balance—like, with bloodletting.

When too much of one humor built up in the body, one way to restore a balance was to

But the most common treatment, then as now, was simply offering good dietary advice.

Aristotle linked the four elements with the humors, but he wasn't a doctor.

The oldest nuggets of humoral wisdom in Western Eurasian medical textbooks were attributed

to a physician named Hippocrates of Cos, which means “Gregory House” in classical Greek.

We know something of his life—he died when Aristotle was in his teens—but we don't

What we do have is a collection of texts of various age and unknown authorship called

According to the corpus, Hippocrates I was a fan of the Pythagoreans.

But his skepticism—or doubt that certain knowledge is possible—set Hippocratic medicine

apart from a lot of Greek natural philosophy.

Hippocrates emphasized reason, observation, and medical prediction.

He emphasized that diet and the environment influence health, not the direct will of the

And his oath—“do no harm”—still underpins medical education.

Hippocrates was the Jimi Hendrix of Eurasian and North African medicine, innovating a new

But Hippocratic physicians had to compete among many schools of healers.

It was a Roman named Galen who became medicine's Michael Jackson—the popularizer of a standard

humorism that would last until the 1800s.

Galen's system absorbed the smaller, uneven Hippocratic corpus.

Galen was born around CE 130 in Pergamon.

But he made his career in Rome, treating gladiators.

This gave him lots of experience peeking into the body while sewing up wounds.

Eventually he got the offer of a lifetime: court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius,

who was a battle-hardened general, Stoic philosopher, and all-around hardcore dude.

Galen wrote a huge number of influential texts—supposedly five hundred!

These show that Galen built on the systems of Hippocrates and Aristotle, but also made

detailed notes on human anatomy drawn from experience.