HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Creativity, Putrefaction, Zoonosis
Western Traditional Medicine Bird's Eye View current
• Western traditional medicine
o Antiquity to the renaissance
o Renaissance to the enlightenment
• The idea of disease
o Thinking about disease as a life of its own
o Thinking about disease as something that goes wrong with our body (Hippocrates)
o These to oepts otradit i peoples ids…
• Medicine as religion vs. religion as medicine
• Medicine as craft
• Medicine & Religion
o First records of medicine come from religion / secular
o Borrows many of its ideas / words from religion
o Divination vs. purification
o Priests had to figure out what sin / god brought the human being into distress
(divination)
o Purify the human of sin or running out the demons
o Predicting & purifying - priests & doctors do
o Not always a hostile relationship b/t medicine & religion
• Ancient Egyptian craft healers
o Secular craftsmen - no reference to religious healing
o Deal with internal illness (headache, stomach ache)
o Action - consistent - result
o First description of therapeutic protocol / routine
o Assessing the limits of craft ethics
• Craft doctors
o Not priests
o Secular people
o Unregulated medical market place
o Techniques draw from Egyptian medicine
• Philosophers
o No gods allowed
o Needs to be a rational explanation
o Doctors move in on this
o Healing intervention based on laws
• Physician
• Galenism
• Scholarship & teaching
o System of knowledge set forth in books
o Taught in institutions
o Teach trained doctors
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Document Summary
Jenner: anaesthesia, opens up revolutionary surgery for health care, renaissance, scientific revolution, enlightenment, disease, sick (weak, lack of capacity, sick different than sickness. Ill (deformity, evil: people with physical disabilities - moral negativity, disease (discomfort, ailment (suffering, pain, external, ontological conceptions (disease comes from the outside, material or object from the outside - poison (toxic, arrow, a living material - worm. Invisible powerful being - demon, god: demons - torment us, gods - punish us. Internal: dynamic or physiological concepts (enemy is inside us, body"s failure to respond to environment, putrefaction - rotting garbage --> septic wound. Irrigation is required (law, government) to control disputes about land. Like the nil river: channel for food, air (mouth --> anus, putrefaction inside of the body - get it out from either side of the channel, aim is to unblock the channel due to putrefaction. Important of elimination in therapy: arrest corruption, get the bad stuff out, blocked channels due to putrefaction.
