Ancient medicine

    A few words about ancient medicine

In the time of ancient Roman Empire surgeons had a wide range of painkillers and sedatives to help in surgical procedures. Some of the often used was extracts of opium poppy (morphine) and of henbane seeds (scopolamine).  The many folk remedies known at this time used throughout the Roman Empire were tested in many battles by Roman physicians on wounded and ailing soldiers, who sifted through and found the treatments and techniques with the most useful effects

Dioscurides was an ancient physician who resided in Rome during the first century. He composed a compendium of all the medical matters (materia medica) then known from Greek medicine and other sources. Dioscurides may have learned his medicine by practical experience while he was in the legions, and it is most certainly that he relied on an earlier work by the ancient medical doctor Crateuas. His great 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 in equal parts with scientific illustration. It was only with mechanized type that this problem of lag-time could be overcome.

Late antiquity was a time when a revolution in the medical scene happened, that was the birth of the hospital. Literary sources occasionally mention hospitals, but only documents from Egypt make known how widespread they were at this time. These Egyptian testimonials record a large number of hospitals established by private individuals and independent of religious institutions. The starting point of the hospital as an independent institution for the care and healing 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 views of late antiquity.