History of Medicine: Classical Age I
As ancient Greece, especially Athens, entered the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, what is sometimes called the 'Greek miracle' or the 'Athenian miracle', a 'confluence of intellectuals, of forcesāor maybe there was something wonderful in the waterāthat led to this incredible birth of many institutions, literary genres and different ways of looking at the world that the European West continues to celebrate today. This was the time of the flowering of architecture, of tragedy, comedy, democracy, philosophy, mathematics, empiricism and rationality', at least for the men who were citizens of Athens, not the slaves they owned nor women, who were restricted to the houses during this time. The idea of this miracle was supported by the Romans, who held Athens in high regard and also informed how much of the West continued to think, especially in places that had been dominated by the Roman Empire.
Regardless of the uniqueness or superiority of this 'miracle', it is during this time that two centers of medical learning rose to prominence in Greece: Cos and Cnidos, with the doctors there claiming to be descended from Asclepius, the god of healing and fabled doctor himself. While this claim was false, it highlighted 'that medical skill had once been transmitted in families. As there was a good livelihood in the craft, medically able fathers wanted to pass it on to their sons. Neither Cos nor Cnidos had a formal medical school which could impose a syllabus or exams on students: the very notion of "Schools" of thought was a later one in Greek history, formulated most clearly in the third century BC onwards. Study was with individual doctors, but in due course, they would start to teach pupils from outside their own family, partly because they might be more talented than blood relations, but also because they could be charged fees'. These students would then take on an apprentice role, likely taking on the assistant role.
Cnidian Sentences, a text now lost to us, was likely the first diagnostic book in Greek, marking a change in how medical information was transmitted. It divided out various illnesses, including 'twelve diseases of the bladder', 'four diseases of the kidneys', and so on, according to Galen, a much later Roman physician, splitting rather than lumping diseases together. This allowed those who wanted to learn medicine could more readily, a pattern that has repeated many times after the advent of writing and literacy into a culture. We don't know exactly when it was written after the matter of Pythagoras, so likely it was written in the late 6th or early 5th century BCE by Euryphon, according to Galen, though modern scholarship thinks he benefited from them. The Cnidian Sentences prescribed milk consumption for many illnesses, including feeding patients with consumption 'mother's milkā¦[t]he patients had to be suckled directly at the breast because milk, Euryphon believed, lost some of its quality if it was exposed away from its source'.
Another Cnidian that we know of is Ctesias, who traveled with Artaxerxes II, the Achaemenid king in 401 BCE as his personal physician as he rose up against his brother, Cyrus the Younger. He wrote several texts including a long text that we only know about from exerts in other texts called Persian Matters (Persica), but we know it contained medical knowledge that differed from the Sentences, and was supposedly based on the history of the Persian empire, but it varies from the cuneiform sources, with a modern author writing '(Ctesias's) unreliability makes Herodotus seem a model of accuracy'.
Cnidos was closely aligned with Egypt and their practice, though they also developed their own techniques and medications, such as the fruit of the evergreen daphne, which 'are powerfully inflammatory if taken in quantity. Realizing this fact, the ancients used them more moderately as pills or in combination with honey and other fluidsā¦Recently, distilled compounds from this daphne have been tested and proposed effective againstā¦breast cancers. However, these compounds are obtained not from the plant's berries, but its roots'.
