‘Doctor,
whenever I get up I feel dizzy for half an hour.’ ‘Then wait for half an hour
before getting up.’ Alexander the Great trust to physician Phillip, Henryk
Siemiradzki
Helen King
Professor of Classical Studies at The Open
University
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The ancient Greeks are widely seen as having been
the founders of Western medicine more than 2,000 years ago. But since then our
understanding of the human body and how to treat it has changed beyond
recognition. So what would be the point of studying ancient Greek medicine
today?
It’s part of a more general question: why bother
studying medicine from times before people knew about germs, antibiotics, the
circulation of the blood, or anaesthetics? Although we now have a far more
detailed and accurate picture of medicine, I think the ancient Greeks can help
us think through a number of topics that are still relevant today.
1. New (old) treatments
The idea that we might uncover an unknown
treatment in a forgotten treatise looks like a promising reason to study the
ancient Greeks. But it’s not that simple. Yes, it’s possible that a forgotten
plant used in the ancient world will prove to be the basis for a new drug today
but that hasn’t happened yet. It would have to get through the various stages
of testing that we now regard as essential, and that’s not always
straightforward. And ancient Greece was not some golden age of simple, safe
medicine. Some treatments such as womb fumigation were unpleasantly invasive.
Others used very dangerous materials such as hellebore.
However, drugs weren’t the starting point of
ancient medicine. First came diet, in the broad sense of your whole way of
life, including food, drink, exercise, excrement and sleep. Health was seen as
the balance of different fluids in the body. The focus on diet was never a call
to eat raw foods, whatever the claims of modern charlatans who use the name of
the ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates to sell their diet regimes.
A patient’s condition was thought to result not
just from the balance of their body, but from how that body relates to the
environment. With diseases related to obesity and mental health today taking an
increasing amount of doctors' time, it’s not unsurprising medicine is turning
more and more to a Greek-style holistic approach.
2. Medicine requires trust
While using ancient Greek medicine as a source of
remedies is problematic, drawing on it to understand the doctor/patient
relationship is more straightforward. We still say, “Trust me, I’m a doctor”.
But there was clearly a lot of unease about doctors in the ancient world. They
weren’t family members so it felt risky to let them near your body, especially
when you weren’t feeling very strong. Being ill was seen as a loss of
self-control and therefore damaging to a man’s masculinity.
To gain a patient’s trust, a doctor had to make
sure his image was right. Today it’s the white coat. In ancient Greece it was
all about wearing plain, simple clothing, avoiding strong perfumes and never
quoting the poets at the patient’s bedside. If you’ve read any Greek tragedy,
you’ll see why not. When you are feeling ill, it isn’t cheering to hear “Death
is the only water to wash away this dirt” or “alone in my misery I would crawl,
dragging my wretched foot”. As a doctor, you needed to understand what your
patients were thinking, and help them to trust you. And if they trusted you,
then they’d take the remedies.
3. Treatments go in and out of fashion
Medicine isn’t some linear process in which we
move steadily towards “The Truth”. It has its ups and downs, and new
discoveries don’t always catch on. Human dissection as a way of finding out how
the body works was carried out in the third century BC but was then abandoned
for hundreds of years. With this in mind, we can study why particular methods
of treatment are adopted or resisted.
Roman medicine seems to have been a simple,
home-based approach with the head of the family collecting and applying
remedies. When Greek medicine began to take over in Rome, it was not an instant
success: a story about an early Greek doctor in Rome labels him “The Butcher”.
Greek medicine’s eventual triumph was not because
it was “better”. It may have been the appeal of a fashionable practice. Or
because it was based outside the family. Or it may have been due to the fact it
had explanations attached rather than relying entirely on trust in authority.
4. We all want to know “why?”
Why me? Why now? Ancient religion blamed the
gods, or your failings in not honouring the right one in the right way. Ancient
medicine also explained illness in terms of what you had done wrong, but it
pointed less to moral failings and instead to eating the wrong foods, or taking
too much or too little exercise. The time of year, the location of your home,
or the prevailing wind could all play a part in diagnosis.
Once we know “why”, we can find out what to do to
get better. Ancient medicine suggests that putting the blame only on the
patient won’t help, something modern medicine is just starting to realise.
People are more likely to have a positive attitude if they can look to a “why?”
that’s outside themselves.
5. We don’t know everything
Perhaps I’m biased on this point: my pregnant
mother turned down the offer of a prescription of thalidomide, a drug that used
to be prescribed for morning sickness but was eventually discovered to severely
damage unborn children. Medicine gets it wrong. We’d be naive to think that
everything we do now is right.
The ancient Greeks thought they had the answers.
So do we. Looking at a medical system so different from our own, but one which
lasted for many centuries, teaches us that we should never accept anything
without challenging it and without being prepared to rethink if new evidence
comes along.
But the Greeks also teach us that medicine needs
to make sense to its audience. It was not like our quest for “a pill for every
ill”, the same treatment for a disease regardless of the patient. It was
holistic, preventative, and tailored to the individual. Similarly, in the wake
of modern genetic studies, customising medicine to each person has become a
focus of medicine once more. We can learn a lot from the ancient Greeks.
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