A child with tuberculosis Tuberculosis is a lung disease caused by germs. Today we can usually cure it with antibiotics. But in antiquity there was no cure. Many people died of tuberculosis. One kind of tuberculosis seems to have infected people since the Paleolithic. It came to North America and South America with the first people, about 13,000 BC. This tuberculosis [...]
Influenza comes from chickens: this is a clay hen whistle from Mohenjo Daro (ca. 2700 BC, now in Brooklyn Museum) What is influenza? Influenza is a virus that mostly infects birds - like chickens - and pigs. But influenza can also attack people. Influenza history goes back a long, long time. Where do chickens come from? How about [...]
Roman medicine: Galen used surgical instruments like these Roman medicine is really West Asian and African medicine. That's because most of the great doctors of the Roman Empire lived in West Asia (in Turkey and Syria), or in Africa (in Egypt), not in Europe. These doctors started from earlier Egyptian, Indian, and Greek medical research. Like Egyptian [...]
Islamic medicine: From an Ottoman manuscript, two doctors telling the pharmacist how to make different medicines Writing medical encyclopedias Doctors made big scientific advances in medicine during the Islamic empire. Islamic doctors began by collecting all the medical observations and logic of the past. They translated the work of Hippocrates and his followers, and Galen, into Arabic. About 750 [...]
Greek medicine: Sacrificing a sheep to Asclepius Getting sick in ancient Greece Disease was a very serious problem for the Greeks, as for all other people in the ancient and medieval worlds. One out of three babies died before they were a year old. Half of all children died before they were ten. And even [...]
Ancient Greek science: Greek doctor letting blood out of a patient because he believes in the four humors When did Greek science get started? By about 600 BC, ancient Greek people were getting richer from trading between Egypt, West Asia, Carthage, and Europe. Now richer families could afford to send their boys to college. More boys got a good education and became scientists. Soon [...]
