HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Birds Eye View, Avicenna, Classical Antiquity
Document Summary
First part of the course is taking a chronological art over the history of medicine from classical antiquity up to almost the 18th century. This is going to be transformed into a more thematic approach int he 19th and 20th centuries as a new paradigm wipes out a system of medicine that was dominant in the western world for a very long time. Bird"s eye view over the chunk of time: changes, themes, unities. Mesopotamia, and the greeks (hippocrates gives a substantial body of literature about how doctors think. ) Hippocratic corpus is the earlier greek writing that we have. There is a lot of writing as well. Greeks create the idea that a doctor is more than just a craftsman: a doctor is someone who thinks about cause and effect, and builds his medical practice within a wider enterprise among thinking about nature. This is all a period of western traditional medicine being dominant.
