Science & Medicine

Medicine is the science and \"art\" of maintaining and restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of patients. The term is derived from the Latin ars medicina meaning the art of healing. more...

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The modern practice of medicine occurs at the many interfaces between the art of healing and various sciences. Medicine is directly connected to the health sciences and biomedicine. Broadly speaking, the term 'Medicine' today refers to the fields of clinical medicine, medical research and surgery, thereby covering the challenges of disease and injury.

History of medicine

The earliest type of medicine in most cultures was the use of empirical natural resources like plants (herbalism), animal parts and minerals. In all societies, including Western ones, there were also religious, ritual and magical resources. In aboriginal societies, there is a large scope of medical systems related to religious thinking, cultural experience, and natural resources. The religious ones more known are: animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits); spiritualism (here meaning an appeal to gods or communion with ancestor spirits); shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers); and divination (the supposed obtaining of truth by magic means). The field of medical anthropology studies the various medical systems and their interaction with society, while prehistoric medicine addresses diagnosis and treatment in prehistoric times.

The practice of medicine developed gradually in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, Greece, Persia, the Islamic world, medieval Europe and early modern period in Persia (Rhazes and Avicenna), Spain (Abulcasis and Avenzoar), Syria/Egypt (Ibn al-Nafis, 13th century), Italy (Gabriele Falloppio, 16th century), England (William Harvey, 17th century). Medicine as it is now practiced largely developed during the 19th and 20th centuries in Germany (Rudolf Virchow, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Robert Koch), Austria (Karl Landsteiner, Otto Loewi), United Kingdom (Edward Jenner, Alexander Fleming, Joseph Lister, Francis Crick), New Zealand (Maurice Wilkins), Australia (Howard Floery, Frank Macfarlane Burnet), Russia (Nikolai Korotkov), United States (William Williams Keen, Harvey Cushing, William Coley, James D. Watson), Italy (Salvador Luria), Switzerland (Alexandre Yersin), Japan (Kitasato Shibasaburo), and France (Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, Paul Broca and others). The new \"scientific\" or \"experimental\" medicine (where results are testable and repeatable) replaced early Western traditions of medicine, based on herbalism, the Greek \"four humours\" and other pre-modern theories.

The focal points of development of clinical medicine shifted to the United Kingdom and the USA by the early 1900s (Canadian-born) Sir William Osler, Harvey Cushing). Possibly the major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection, especially during the Black Death in the 14th and 15th centuries, of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was paralleled by a similar shift in European society in general - see Copernicus's rejection of Ptolemy's theories on astronomy). Physicians like Ibn al-Nafis and Vesalius led the way in improving upon or indeed rejecting the theories of great authorities from the past (such as Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna), many of whose theories were in time discredited. Such new attitudes were made possible in Europe by the weakening of the Roman Catholic church's power in society, especially in the Republic of Venice.

Read more at Wikipedia.org