Ancient Greek Medicine - Historical Legacy

Historical Legacy

Through long contact with Greek culture, and their eventual conquest of Greece, the Romans absorbed many of the Greek ideas on medicine. Early Roman reactions to Greek medicine ranged from enthusiasm to hostility, but eventually the Romans adopted a favorable view of Hippocratic medicine.

This acceptance led to the spread of Greek medical theories throughout the Roman Empire, and thus a large portion of the West. The most influential Roman scholar to continue and expand on the Hippocratic tradition was Galen (d. c. 207). Study of Hippocratic and Galenic texts, however, all but disappeared in the Latin West in the Early Middle Ages, following the collapse of the Western Empire, although the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition of Greek medicine continued to be studied and practiced in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). After 750 AD, Muslim Arab also had Galen's works in particular translated, and thereafter assimilated the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, eventually making some of their own expansions upon this tradition, with the most influential being Avicenna. Beginning in the late eleventh century, the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition returned to the Latin West, with a series of translations of the Galenic and Hippocratic texts, mainly from Arabic translations but occasionally from the original Greek. In the Renaissance, more translations of Galen and Hippocrates directly from the Greek were made from newly available Byzantine manuscripts. Galen's influence was so great that even after Western Europeans started making dissections in the thirteenth century, scholars often assimilated findings into the Galenic model that should have thrown Galen's accuracy into doubt. Vesalius' anatomical texts and pictures were, however, a major improvement on Galen's anatomy. William Harvey's demonstration of blood circulation was perhaps the first real blow to Galen's inaccurate ideas about blood circulation. Nevertheless, the Hippocratic-Galenic practice of bloodletting was practiced into the 19th century, despite its ineffectiveness and extreme riskiness. The Galenic-Hippocratic tradition was only really replaced when the microscope-based studies of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and others demonstrated that disease was not caused by an imbalance of the four humors, but rather by microorganisms such as bacteria.