The History of Medicine

Medicine has always been a big part in helping people get better, it has been around for a long time. You could go back hundreds of years and find some sort of medicine that as been around. It all started with Hippocrates, he was a doctor in 400 BC in Ancient

Greece. He has come up with the idea of the four humors. The four humors were: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. He believed if these were imbalanced then you would become ill. The second person that came into the medicine world is Galen.

Galen was a gladiator surgeon in Ancient Rome in 120 AD. He dissected animas to discover what the anatomy looked like. He said that the inside of an animal is the same as the inside of a human. Entering the 1500s time period now, Vesalius was an anatomist; he worked in the Renaissance era. He took bodies from cemeteries and dissected them. In 1543 he published a book called ‘The fabric of the Human body’ this contained details such as pictures of the anatomy of the human body. The book allowed everyone to understand what the inside of our bodies look like. He corrected over 200 of

Galen’s mistakes. Pare was another main person that played an important role during this time period. He was a war surgeon during this Renaissance period. When soldiers were wounded they bled a lot, so instead of cauterizing the wounds (pressuring a boiling hot metal iron on the wound) he used an ointment that contained egg yolk, oil of roses, and other herbs instead. He used ligatures made from silk threads to tie up the arteries and veins to stop the bleeding. He published a book called ‘Works of surgery’ in

1575 to tell other surgeons about his ideas. Harvey is another person that worked during the Renaissance period, he discovere...

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... wouldn’t be where we are right now or it would have taken much longer to be where we are as of right now in the modern world. We have come a long way from hundreds of years ago, we have found cure for some of the diseases that were going around in the early years such as Tuberculosis, The black death, and one of the most important ones penicillin in my opinion because today we still use penicillin and need it, without it we would have many people that wouldn’t be here or make it to adult hood for that matter.

We are very blessed to have the vaccinations that we are able to receive and the other things we are offered in the United States, there are some places that aren’t as fortunate as we are.

Works Cited

• http://i.nursegroups.com/nursing-article/medicine-through-time.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_medicine_and_medical_technology