The Ancient Greeks though made major strides in medical knowledge. The works of Hippocrates (a Greek medical genius) and his followers led to several scientific facts being recorded for the first time he was the first person ever to study the patients he was working with his method: diagnose, prognose, observe and treat. Hippocrates theory of the Four Humours was, for a long time, the basis upon which to develop their medical knowledge. Some of the medical methods we use are based around methods Hippocrates thought all them years ago!
Roman medicine was a mixture of new theories and developments of Greek practices. Medicine was improved through the studies of Galen; this was through a desire to maintain a fit and healthy army to keep control of their empire. Medicine in Ancient Rome also brought about some great developments of Public Health facilities.
Unlike the Greeks the Roman cities were very large and contained a lot of people, they did this so that communication was good and therefore ideas would spread quickly, but so would diseases. Instead of the Ancient Greeks the Romans had doctors to stop disease before catching it, whereas the Greeks would try to find a cure and they would take their time, the Romans could not afford to do this as they had a big army to look after and they could not risk plagues or other terrible diseases going through their armies. They had developed the Greek ideas of running water and washing thoroughly.
The first doctors in Rome were Greek; they were captured in battle after the Roman Empire had now made their move for world domination. As you can imagine the people of Rome didn’t like this, as they would feel inferior in medicine. In 46bc Julius Cesar (The Emperor) said that doctors could become citizens of the Roman Empire, as all the doctors in Rome were Greek, this was now an incentive for all Greek people to train as a doctor. The people of Rome didn’t like the Greek method of treating the sick as they thought a healthy diet and exercise would not work. Everybody had read about Hippocrates who was a famous Greek doctor and the doctors became more frequent throughout Rome mainly to a shortage of jobs at the Greeks fallen Empire. The Roman population was now around 1million and they now had an independent government. The price for doctors was very high and for people who couldn’t afford this they had to prepare home remedies, such as herbs and spices. They realised after a lot of people were becoming ill that they were all living next to a swamp that realised that the swamps were causing this disease that was killing the population, the disease is now commonly known as malaria. To prevent this they built a temple next to the swamp and dedicated this to the god of Fever. They soon noticed that this wasn’t working and they decided to drain the pond. This proves that the Romans thought about their methods and questioned them and try to improve them.
The Romans were now very wealthy and could afford to train their own doctors although the training was based on the Hippocratic oath deigned by Hippocrates the Greek doctor, but his method did work as not long after the Romans started to design their own instrument for amputations on their patients. They had started to employ ‘Public Doctors’ these were to make sure the Roman people were all fit and healthy. There were still other method of curing or preventing disease and that was to build temples for the Gods theses were called Asclepions, they were to treat the injured and the unwell. They were also the first people to introduce the Roman baths these were for people to relax and to wash themselves in, they would cost a small amount of money so the baths could be kept clean. It didn’t stop there as they invented the first ‘public toilets’, these were made to stop the public going to the toilet in the street to stop infection and disease. In Roman times there idea was that prevention was better than cure. but the main reason was that they thought that a bad smell meant that there was disease about and therefore they wanted to stop any bad smell this was also a reason why they built the Asclepions. They built these sacred medical buildings after a plague in 293bc. This is at least one of the similarities of the Greek and Roman medical knowledge.
In AD 129-216 the new face of Roman medicine was arriving. Galen was a doctor from the age of 12; he had a very rich family. He met lots of important people and he was taught at the best medical school around in the great city of Alexandria on the mouth of the River Nile (Egypt) where he studied medicine for 10 years. Galen travelled around the Roman Empire finding out about new ideas and cures. He later returned back to his birthplace in Pergamum in 157AD to a job tending to the Gladiators and later in 161AD ha travelled to Rome to work on the Gladiators there. This is where Galen writes hid books about his cures and theories for illnesses. Galen then decides to dissect animals, as he wants to find out more about the human body. He can’t cut up a human body, as that is illegal in the Roman Empire even for medical purposes! There was one problem with this method and that was that he thought the animals he was dissecting and looking at their bones were the same as human bones and so he wrote wrong information in his books i.e. he realised that monkeys had 2 jaw bones and so he wrote that humans did as well, but as we well know they do not.
