HLTHAGE 1AA3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Traditional Medicine, Hygieia, Special Functions
4 Mar 2013
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Document Summary
Medical practitioners and priests in the tigris-euphrates and nile valleys were one. Illness was a spiritual problem and was regarded as punishment for sins or for violations of the norms of society such as stealing, blaspheming or drinking from an impure vessel. Imhotep, the egyptian pharaoh who built the stepped pyramid, medicine began to receive some separate recognition. Medical practitioners could only treat external maladies; internal maladies were seen to be only treatable through supernatural intervention. Modern western medicine appears to have been derived from greece in the 4th and 5th centuries before christ and from medieval europe. Early greeks erected temples in honour of hygeia, the greek goddess of healing and those who were ill sought treatment at these temples. Hippocrates was a greek physician who was distinguished by their efforts to secularize the concept of disease by making its treatment not the concern solely of priests and its focus not simply on the supernatural.
