Evolution of the medical science [Archives:2004/792/Education]

By Tammam Ali Al-Baramaki,
School-leaver”science”
A mother finds that her baby has a high fever. The baby is so uncomfortable that he cries all the time. But soon the doctor comes. After a few minutes he knows what is wrong. He gives the baby some medicine. Before long the fever goes down. In a day or so the baby is well. Happenings of this kind are very common. Doctors play an important part in the lives of almost everyone. When we are ill, doctors find out what is wrong with us. They know how to help us get well. Doctors do even more than help us get well if we are sick. They do much to keep us from getting sick. Doctoring of this kind is achieved by preventive medicine. Many doctors today are specialists. They treat only certain kinds of diseases or only certain parts of the body. There are, for instance, eye specialists, heart specialists, and specialists in kidney diseases. There are doctors who are experts in diagnosis in finding out what is wrong. There are surgeons – doctors who operate. In the United States and in most other countries, too, doctors must pass examinations before they are allowed to practice. A doctor who is not very trained could potentially and actually do a great deal of harm.
People will have accidents and diseases, as long as there will be people. Doctors will be needed. So, understandably, from very, very early times there have been doctors.
We can get some idea of what the earliest doctoring must have been like from doctoring practices in some of the primitive tribes of today. In these tribes medicine men work on the idea that evil spirits in the sick person's body are causing the sickness. They try, partly with noise and dancing, to drive the evil spirit away. In ancient Egypt and Babylonia, medicine and religion were closely tied together. The healers were both doctors and priests. They were druggists, too. Ancient Babylonian clay tablets have been found which tell the symptoms of various diseases and the drugs to use. The course of treatment constitutes tablets and prayers to the gods.
A famous Egyptian collection of 800 prescriptions has been written by doctor-priests. Some of the medicines of early times were very strange. The Egyptians, for instance, believed that ground-u- emeralds were helpful in certain diseases. Poor people who could not afford emeralds had to be satisfied with green porcelain. Even though the science of medicine began more than 2000 years ago, strange ideas of treating diseases lasted down through the Middle Ages. For a long time using leechings or leeches to draw blood from a sick person was so common that doctors were often called leeches. Nasty-tasting brews were concocted; one idea was that the best medicines were those that tasted worst. For a time surgery was given over to barbers.
To treat sick people intelligently, a doctor must know a great deal about the human body. But people were slow to find out much about how our bodies are built. Scientists knew how the distant planets travel around the sun as soon as they knew how our blood circulates.
The science of medicine began with the Greek Hippocrates. He earned for himself the name of father of medicine. Hippocrates taught that every disease has a natural cause – that it is not due to evil spirits. He separated medicine and religion. His students swore to do all that they could do to help the sick, to keep in confidence what their patients told them, and not to intentionally harm anyone. Doctors still follow the 'Oath of Hippocrates”. Many hundreds of doctors have made medicine what it is today.
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