Today's ancient pharmacists

Production team The pharmaceutical-rich shelves of modern Western chemists and hospitals filled with sophisticated technologies, like CAT and MRI scanners, which focus on the minutiae of human anatomy and physiology, seem far removed from the home remedies and medicines of the past, the shamans and healing shrines, but are modern medical technologies really so different?

Do the contents of the shelves in Boots have nothing in common with the 230 medicines found listed in an ancient Assyrian pharmacy? Is a pacemaker trusted with regulating the heartbeat so different from a heart scarab worn by an ancient Egyptian? We may not believe that illness is a curse of malevolent spirits, but we still seek specialist help to understand complex diseases.

Ancient medicine, particularly of Greece and Rome, has influenced many aspects of modern medicine. The Greek Hippocratic school developed the concept of the four humours to assist diagnosis of conditions; this seems to share many similarities with Far Eastern and Indian medical systems (such as the Chinese Five Elements), but these parallels may be coincidental. The four humours formed the basis of Western medicine throughout the Middle Ages and continued to influence it into the nineteenth century. Despite Galen having never dissected a human body, his anatomical texts went unchallenged until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius (1514-64) performed his own dissections and published his findings, highlighting Galen’s mistakes.

Surgical instruments, such as forceps, scalpels and rectal and vaginal specula, share startling similarities with their ancient Egyptian and Roman counterparts. Roman military hospitals are the precursors of modern hospitals, each treating both illness and injury and comparable in their basic architectural design. Leisure and fitness centres, with swimming pool, sauna, massage and beauty treatment rooms, gyms and athletics facilities, have a great deal in common with the Greek gymnasia and, particularly, the Roman bathing complexes. The Graeco-Roman propensity to maintain physical wellness, through regulated diet and exercise, is reflected in our enthusiasm for these centres as well as for healthy eating options and alternative therapies. This seems to represent a return to a more holistic approach to health, which goes hand-in-hand with a decline in patient confidence as awareness of the strains on the NHS increases. Decline in patient confidence has echoes of Plautus’ Roman comedy satirising the lack of trust in a Greek doctor’s skills, written in the 3rd century BCE!

Modern anatomical terms are a hybrid of the Greek and Latin languages, passed down to us from Hippocrates and Galen, via the Medieval Arab world to the Renaissance, and into current usage. So, ‘retina’ comes from the Latin réte (‘net’) because the Alexandrian Herophilus, when dissecting the eye, called one of its membranes ‘net-like’. ‘Caesarean’ is from the Roman Lex Caesarea (‘Caesar’s Law’), which stipulated that if a pregnant woman died, the foetus must be removed and buried separately. Modern medical symbols, such as the snake-entwined staff, also have their origins in Greek medicine (the snake was the symbol of Aesculapius).

The Hippocratic Oath immortalises the ethical relationship of doctor to patient but, whilst its essence remains today, it is no longer universally sworn by medical graduates. However, Hippocrates’ legacy survives. The Hippocratic Method, a process still used for treating a dislocation, is described in the Hippocratic Corpus:
“The patient must lie on his/her back on the ground while the person who will carry out the reduction sits on the ground on the side of the dislocation. S/he then takes the affected arm and pulls it, whilst pushing in the opposite direction with his/her heel in the armpit… a round ball of suitable size must be placed in the armpit hollow, because without this the heel cannot reach to the head of the humerus” (Hippocrates ‘On the Articulations’).

So, whilst technological advancements continue to be made in diagnostic methods and treatments, the legacy of ancient medicine remains with us in all areas of modern medicine.

What The Ancients Did For Us in more depth: