A Short History of Medicine by Charles Singer

Scientific Medicine began with the Greeks. The Greeks not only started scientific Medicine upon its course, but also provided the substantial basic elements of our anatomy, physiology and pathology, and above all, perhaps, our conception of the bodily ‘constitution', ‘habit' or ‘temperament'. It is from the Greeks that we derive almost all our medical nomenclature. When to this we add that our medical traditions are inherited through a direct and continuous chain from the Greek practitioners, it becomes evident that the debt that Medicine owes to this marvellous people is great indeed.

Now this debt has become associated with two or three great figures. The names Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, are familiar to all. Yet it is not always recognized that these men were but the representatives of a widely extended and long-lasting system. Greek Medicine was, in fact, like modern Medicine, the result of centuries of carefully recorded, collated and progressive research. Greek Medicine first assumed a scientific aspect with the Ionian and Italo-Greek philosophers at the very beginning of the sixth century B. C. It continued to make important advances until the death of Galen at the very end of the second century of the Christian era. Thus the life-span of progressive and scientific Medicine among the Greeks was no less than eight hundred years. With the most tolerant use of the words ‘scientific' and ‘progressive', we can hardly place the beginnings of modern Medicine in Europe before the end of the fifteenth century. Thus our own system has only been developing its characteristic features for some four and a half centuries, which is but little more than half the course that Greek science ran.