HECKBERT: Medicine has come a long way

In his latest Keep Moving column, Steve Heckbert writes about the progress made in the medical field over the past several centuries. (Photo: Alexander Grey/Unsplash)

Humanity’s early attempts at medicine were filled with guesswork. Nothing much was known at first about restoring sick people to health. Handover of “common” medical knowledge from one generation to the next happened by word of mouth, if at all.

About 5,000 years ago, ancient China began testing herbal remedies on themselves, rather than animals. The first practitioner was then-emperor Shen Nung (circa 2800 BC), venerated as the father of Chinese medicine and author of the ancient system of yin and yang (female and male). Balance was the thing that yielded good health … sound advice from that day to this.

The Babylonians, then the Egyptians, based their early medicine on religion, making their priests who practised surgery answerable only to God. India took an alternate path, making their healing medicine “holistic” (covering the whole body rather than just the afflicted parts) in the system of ayurveda, which combined elements of surgery with knowledge of plants, herbs, aromas, colours and lifestyle. First developed about 1500 BC, ayurveda was not written down till 200 BC, leading to the Atreya Samhita, the oldest medical book there is.

The enlightened Greeks started stepping medicine toward a discipline of continuous improvement by developing and applying the humanist principles of science. Their early gods of medicine, Apollo, then Aesculapius, gave way to the renowned physician Hippocrates (460-380 BC). Doctors still swear the Hippocratic oath, regarded as the foundation of Western medical ethics.

As we read in Trevor Homer’s The Book of Origins: “I swear by Apollo the healer, by Aesculapius, by health and all the powers of healing, that I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment.”