Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 1.1
A sick child brought to the Temple of Aesculapius.
Courtesy of http://www.nouveaunet.com/images/
art/84.jpg.
the night, “healers” visited their patients, administering medical advice to clients who were
awake or interpreting dreams of those who had slept. In this way, patients became convinced
that they would be cured by following the prescribed regimen of diet, drugs, or bloodletting.
On the other hand, if they remained ill, it would be attributed to their lack of faith. With
this approach, patients, not treatments, were at fault if they did not get well. This early use
of the power of suggestion was effective then and is still important in medical treatment
today. The notion of “healthy mind, healthy body” is still in vogue today.
One of the most celebrated of these “healing” temples was on the island of Cos, the birth-
place of Hippocrates, who as a youth became acquainted with the curative arts through his
father, also a physician. Hippocrates was not so much an innovative physician as a collector
of all the remedies and techniques that existed up to that time. Since he viewed the physi-
cian as a scientist instead of a priest, Hippocrates also injected an essential ingredient into
medicine: its scientific spirit. For him, diagnostic observation and clinical treatment began
to replace superstition. Instead of blaming disease on the gods, Hippocrates taught that
disease was a natural process, one that developed in logical steps, and that symptoms were
reactions of the body to disease. The body itself, he emphasized, possessed its own means
of recovery, and the function of the physician was to aid these natural forces. Hippocrates
treated each patient as an original case to be studied and documented. His shrewd
