Greek civilization emerged around 700 B.C.E. and continued until around 600 C.E. Greek doctors used rational thinking when dealing with medicine. This approach continues to influence medicine today.

1. Greece
The territory of the beginning of
the practice of healing
Memoona Arshad
Group 11
6th Sem
ISM-IUK
Presented to: Mam Rahat

2. What is ancient Greek
Medicine
 Greek civilization emerged around 700
B.C.E. and continued until around 600
C.E. Greek doctors used rational
thinking when dealing with medicine.
This approach continues to influence
medicine today.

3. Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek

4. What is ancient Greek Medicine
(Contd..)
 Greek doctors turned the corner from a
reliance on divine intervention for healing to
practical, natural solutions.
 Some of their theories continue to impact
present scientific and medical thinking.
 The ancient Greeks embraced the concept of
“a healthy mind in a healthy body,” and their
view of medicine incorporated both physical
and mental wellbeing.
 The most famous and probably the most
important medical figure in ancient Greece
was Hippocrates, who we know today as “the
father of medicine.”

5. Medicine & Math
 In the early days of ancient Greece, medicine was not yet a
definable subject.
 In time, specialists in other fields brought knowledge to bear
on the field of health, and they established the discipline of
medicine.
 Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C.E. He was a
mathematician who brought his theory of numbers into the
natural sciences.
 His followers believed that numbers had precise meanings,
especially the numbers 4 and 7.
 They noted that:
◦ 7 x 4 is 28, the length of the lunar month and the menstrual cycle
◦ 7 x 40 is 280, the number of days of a full-term pregnancy
 They also believed that a baby that was born in the seventh
month, rather than the eighth, would enjoy better health.
 The 40-day quarantine period to avoid disease contagion
comes from the idea that the number 40 is sacred.

6. Medicine & Math (Contd..)
The Ancient Greeks were the first people to establish medicine as a separate
discipline.

7. Culture & Philosophy
 The ancient Greeks were thirsty for logic and
logic-based discussions, and they were
curious about why things existed and why
events happened. This curiosity paved the
way for important developments in math and
science.
 Ancient records show that they set up an
early medical school in Cnidus in 700 B.C.E.
Here, they began the practice of observing
patients who were sick.
 Alcmaeon lived around 500 B.C.E. and
worked at this school. He wrote widely on
medicine, although he was probably a
philosopher of science rather than a doctor.

8. Culture & Philosophy
(Contd..)
 He appears to have been the first person to
wonder about the possible internal causes of
illness. He proposed that illness might result
from environmental problems, nutrition, and
lifestyle.
 The Greeks of antiquity were great traders
and relatively wealthy. They promoted and
enjoyed cultural activities, including poetry,
public debates, politics, architecture,
sculpture, comedy, and drama.
 Their writing was phonetic, meaning that
people could read it out loud. This was a
more flexible form of written communication
and easier for people to understand than
hieroglyphs.

9. War & the Olympic Games
 Two crucial factors that encouraged the
ancient Greeks to seek healing and promote
health were military activity and sport.
 In wars, doctors worked to heal wounds,
remove foreign bodies, and look after the
general health of soldiers.
 The Olympic Games, which began in ancient
Greece, raised the need for people to keep
healthy in order to promote fitness and
prevent injury.
 Techniques included using olive oil to raise
body temperature and the practice of
warming up before competing to avoid injury.

10. Olympic Games (Contd..)

11. Nature VS Superstition
 As Greek doctors started wondering whether all
illnesses and disorders might not have a natural cause,
they also considered responding to illness with natural
cures. Until then, incantations and attempts at repelling
evil spirits had been the most popular form of medicine.
 Around 300 B.C.E., Alexander the Great had turned
Greece into a massive empire that spread across the
Middle East. The Greeks built the city of Alexandria in
Egypt, turning it into a vast center for education and
learning.
 The ancient Greeks still believed in and revered their
gods, but science gradually became more critical as
they tried to explain the reasons and solutions for
illnesses and other aspects of life.

12. The Four Humors
 Empedocles put forward the idea that all
natural matter consisted of four elements:
earth, water, air, and fire.
 This idea of four elements prompted ancient
Greek doctors to establish the theory of four
humors or liquids. These four humors were
blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
The idea then developed of keeping these
four humors in balance as a necessity for
good health.
 The ancient Greeks later linked each humor
to a season, an organ, a temper, and an
element, as seen in the table on next slide:

13. The Four Humors (Contd..)
Humor Organ Temper Season Element
Black bile Spleen Melancholy Cold Dry earth
Yellow bile Lungs Phlegmatic
Cold and
wet
Water
Phlegm The head Sanguine
Warm and
wet
Air
Blood Gallbladder Choleric
Warm and
dry
Fire

14. The Four Humors (Contd..)
 The theory developed that when all the humors
balanced and mingled properly, the person would
experience perfect health. Consequently, illness
would occur when someone had too much or too
little of one of the humors.
 This theory remained popular in Western Europe
until the 17th century. However, while the ancient
Greeks pushed medicine forward in many ways,
the theory of humors posed an obstacle to
advances in medical practice.
 It was not until 2,000 years.
 Later that scientists concluded:
◦ the theory was false.

15. Hippocrates
 Hippocrates of Kos lived from 460–370
B.C.E. As the founder of the Hippocratic
School of Medicine, he made major
contributions to medicine that persist today.
 The teaching at his school revolutionized
medicine and established it as a profession
and a discipline in its own right. Until then,
medicine had been a part of philosophy and
the practice of rituals, incantations, and the
casting off of evil spirits.
 Hippocrates and his colleagues wrote the
“Hippocratic Corpus,” which comprised
around 60 early ancient Greek medical
works.

16. Hippocrates (Contd..)
Hippocrates remains ‘the father of western

17. Hippocrates (Contd..)
 These early medical practitioners
promoted the systematic study of clinical
medicine. This means they studied
diseases by directly examining the living
person.
 Nowadays, the Hippocratic oath is a vow
that doctors and other health
professionals take when they qualify.
They swear to practice medicine ethically
and honestly.
 Hippocrates left other legacies as well,
including the following.

18. Hippocratic Fingers
 Hippocrates, and those from his school
of medicine, were the first people to
describe and properly document several
diseases and disorders, including a
detailed description of clubbing of the
fingers.
 Clubbing of the fingers is a hallmark sign
of chronic suppurative lung disease,
cyanotic heart disease, and lung cancer.
Until today, some doctors use the term
“Hippocratic fingers” for clubbed fingers.

19. Hippocratic Fingers (Contd..)

20. The Hippocratic Face
 This term describes a face not long
before death.
 If an individual had the following signs
and they were not making any
improvements, the doctor might suspect
that they were close to death:
◦ a sharp nose
◦ sunken eyes and temples
◦ ears cold and drawn in, with distorted lobes
◦ hard, stretched, and dry facial skin
◦ pale and dusky face

21. The Hippocratic Face
(Contd..)

22. Medical Terminology
 Hippocrates and his school were the first
to use the following medical terms:
◦ acute and chronic
◦ endemic and epidemic
◦ convalescence
◦ crisis
◦ exacerbation
◦ paroxysm
◦ peak
◦ relapse
◦ resolution

23. Other Medical Terms
 Other words that came from ancient
Greek and persist in modern medical
usage include:
◦ bios, or life
◦ genea, relating to birth or descent
◦ gynec, meaning a woman
◦ ophthalmos, an eye
◦ ped- referring to a child
◦ pneuma, or breath
◦ physis, which means being, or nature

24. Medical Practice & Research
 Two famous Greek philosophers, Aristotle (384–
322 B.C.E.) and Plato (424–348 B.C.E.)
concluded that the human body had no use in
the afterlife.
 This thinking spread and influenced Greek
doctors. It allowed the Greeks to start finding out
about the inside of the human body in a
systematic way.
 At Alexandria in Egypt, scholars starting
dissecting dead bodies and studying them.
Sometimes, they would cut open the bodies of
criminals who were still alive. This kind of
research led to the following conclusions:
◦ the brain and not the heart controls movement of
limbs
◦ blood moves through the veins

25. Medical Practice & Research
(Contd..)
 However, they did not note that blood
circulates in the body.
 Thucydides, who lived around 460–395
B.C.E., concluded that prayers were
ineffective against illnesses and plagues
and that epilepsy had a scientific
explanation that was nothing to do with
angry gods or evil spirits.
 As time moved on, Greek medical
professionals and scholars increasingly
sought entirely natural theories for the
cause of diseases.

26. Diagnosis & Treatment
 Greek doctors used diagnostic
methods that were not very different
from those in use today. Many of their
natural remedies were similar to some
current home remedies.

27. Diagnosis
 Greek doctors would carry out clinical
observations. They would perform a
thorough physical examination.
 Their Hippocratic books gave
guidance on how to do the
examination and which diseases to
consider or rule out.

28. Treatment
 As magic and incantations gave way
to a search for natural causes, people
also started looking for natural cures.
 Greek doctors became expert
herbalists and prescribers of natural
remedies. They believed that nature
rather than superstition was the best
healer.

29. Treatment (Contd..)
 Hippocratic books mentioned the following
treatments:
◦ Chest diseases:
 Take barley soup plus vinegar and honey to bring up
phlegm.
◦ Pain in the side:
 Dip a large soft sponge in water and apply gently.
 If the pain reaches the collarbone, the doctor should draw
off blood near the elbow until the blood flows bright red.
◦ Pneumonia:
 A bath will relieve pain and help to bring up phlegm.
 The patient must remain completely still in the bath.
 By trying to balance the four humors when their
patients were ill, doctors would sometimes get
things right, even if they did it for the wrong
reasons.

30. Treatment (Contd..)
 When attempting to balance the
natural temperature of a patient, they:
◦ kept a person warm when they had a cold
◦ kept feverish and sweaty patients dry and
cool
◦ bleed patients to restore the blood
balance
◦ purged a person to restore the bile
balance, for example, by giving them
laxatives or diuretics or making them
vomit

31. Treatment (Contd..)
 In the examples above, the first two make
sense in modern medicine, the third one does
not, and the fourth depends on the person’s
illness. If a person swallows something toxic,
it is sometimes a good idea to cause them to
vomit.
 The Greeks also recommended music and
theater as therapies for mental and physical
illness.
 Examples includedalternating the sound of
the flute and the harp as a treatment for gout,
using music therapy to soothe “passion,” and
watching tragic plays as psychotherapy.

32. Appealing to the God
 Despite shifting toward natural rather than
spiritual remedies, many doctors still appealed to
the gods if their treatments did not work.
 Asklepios was the Greek god of healing, and
there was a temple in Epidaurus, called
Asklepion. Eventually, this and similar temples
became health spas, gymnasiums, public baths,
and sports stadia.
 Some doctors would treat their patients and then
take them to the temple to sleep. They believed
that Hygeia and Panacea, daughters of
Asklepios, would arrive with two holy snakes that
would cure the people they were treating.
 From “Hygeia” we have the word hygiene. The
snake today is the symbol of pharmacists.

33. Appealing to the God
(Contd..)
The snake became a symbol of pharmacy. Many pharmacists still use a similar

34. Surgery
 Constant wars gave doctors experience in practical first aid, and
they became skilled experts at setting broken bones, fixing
dislocated limbs, and curing slipped discs.
 Military doctors would remove arrowheads and other pieces of
weaponry. They also carried out amputations, for example, to stop
the spread of gangrene.
 They would close a wound using thread, and dress it with sponge or
linen soaked in vinegar, wine, oil, or water, seawater, honey, or
powdered plants.
 They then encouraged the patient to consume foods, such as celery,
which they believed had anti-inflammatory properties.
 The ancient Greek’s understanding of infection remained limited,
however. They believed that pus was useful for removing toxins from
the body, an idea that persisted into medieval times.
 However, the lack of effective anesthetic and antiseptic medicines
made it almost impossible for the ancient Greeks to perform surgery
deep inside the human body.

35. Public Health
 The Greek authorities were not aware of the
importance of public health, and they did not
promote it as the Romans did, for example,
through clean water supplies.
 However, the people believed in staying
healthy. There were private and public baths,
some in areas of naturally warm spring water.
 Wealthy and educated Greeks worked at:
◦ maintaining a constant temperature
◦ cleaning their teeth
◦ washing regularly
◦ keeping fit
◦ eating healthfully

36. Public Health (Contd..)
The ancient Greeks built baths for cleaning and leisure
purposes.

37. Public Health (Contd..)
 They aimed to keep the four humors in balance
throughout the year.
 Greek doctors also believed in the benefit of doing
things in moderation.
 A study of data for 83 eminent men in ancient
Greece found that they lived, on average, to
around 70 years of age.
 However, these people would have had the
privilege of good food and relatively comfortable
living conditions. The overall average life
expectancy was probably far lower, due to infant
mortality, death in childbirth, poverty, and other
forms of deprivation.
 Hippocrates noted that poor people would be too

38. Takeaway
 Ancient Greek thinking and philosophy
paved the way for significant advances in
medicine.
 In 129 C.E., Galen was born. He and
other doctors would help to spread
Greek ideas about medicine to the
Roman Empire and beyond.
 As a result, much of what the Greeks
taught and learned about medicine still
persists as a basis for modern scientific
medicine.

39. Refrences
 Ancient Greek medicine: Influences
and practice (medicalnewstoday.com)

40.  Thank You 