Ancient medicine |
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A few words about ancient medicine |
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Ancient Roman surgeons had a
wide range of painkillers and sedatives to help in surgery, including
extracts of
opium poppy
(morphine) and of henbane seeds (scopolamine). There is little doubt that
the many folk
remedies used throughout the Roman Empire
were tested in battle by
Roman physicians on wounded and ailing soldiers,
who sifted through and found the treatments and methods with the most
useful effects Dioscurides was a physician who resided in Rome during the first century. He composed a compendium of all the materia medica then known from Greek medicine and other sources. He may have learned his medicine by practical experience while in the legions, and he most certainly relied on an earlier work by the physician Crateuas. His work describes some 600 plants and their possible medical use. Scientific illustration could only progress as fast as accurate illustrations could be made. Consequently, science progressed pari passu, i.e., in equal parts, with scientific illustration. It was only with mechanized type that this problem of lag-time could be overcome. |
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First hospitals |
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Late
antiquity witnessed a
revolution in the medical scene: the birth of the hospital. Literary
sources occasionally mention hospitals, but only documents from Egypt
reveal how widespread they were at this time. These Egyptian testimonials
record a multitude of hospitals founded by private individuals and
independent of ecclesiastical institutions. The origin of the hospital as
an independent institution for the care and treatment of the sick can be
dated to the third quarter of the fourth century CE. The hospital resolved
major tensions in the
medical, ecclesiastical, and religious scenes of
late antiquity.
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