The evolution of medicine from mythological beliefs to empirical science

¶ … History of Modern Medicine

Looking back at modern medicine today, it is difficult to picture the many preliminary (if not necessarily primitive) earlier transitional stages through which the study of medical science had to progress to reach its modern form. The earliest historical period of medicine was a long period where any attempt to understand diseases and dysfunction was fused inextricably with primitive conceptual understanding of the physical world and the fundamental distinction between living and non-living entities. In varying degrees and applications, assumptions and beliefs that originated with prehistoric man persisted throughout much of the world until only a few centuries ago; even today, they are still evident in many human communities, particularly in undeveloped regions.

That stage of medicine never really ended; rather, it has been continually replaced with more sophisticated and accurate understanding of physiology and the nature of human disease and dysfunction. However, even during the early periods of human civilizations and knowledge, several pre-modern societies (independently) developed logically-valid thought processes and applied deductive reasoning and empirically valid tests of hypotheses to begin forming a genuine understanding of anatomy, physiology, and human disease.

Even today, many aspects of medicine and of medical decisions are heavily influenced by non-scientific psychological and cultural orientation and specific beliefs within different communities. However, the academic discipline of Medicine enjoys a general intellectual dissociation from external beliefs notwithstanding residual influences such as reflected in societal and personal choices about the applications of modern medical science deemed "controversial" in society. The fact that modern medicine has become such an important component of modern human societies is substantially attributable to the fact that human societies have progressed in their perceptions about the world as much as to the successful evolution of medicine from primitive fears and beliefs about spirits to empirical research and public health systems.

The Mythopoeic Stage of Medicine

In the pre-civilization stages of human evolution and very early, prehistoric human experience, human communities generally existed in complete isolation, never encountering other human societies. In retrospect, it is astonishing that the archeological evidence procured from such remote human societies reveals such similarity. Virtually every known prehistoric human community yields evidence of a focus on supposed supernatural influences on the physical world and on human fortune, physical health, and life.

Prehistoric human societies all seem to have conceived of human illness as being a function of relationships with the natural world in the forms of "gods" who reacted to human actions and other mythological entities with specific expectations of humans. Typically, men might suffer the medical consequences of trichinosis from eating uncooked meat or die from tetanus from an otherwise inconsequential wound incurred while hunting. These experiences would have been universal among even the most isolated early human communities. The near uniformity of the types of conclusions that were apparently drawn from these types of experiences led to very similar responses, such as rituals and sacrificial gifts of food to the gods and spirits who controlled the weather, the abundance or scarcity of prey, and the safety and welfare of those who depended on the physical world of the gods and spirits.

During the first historical periods in the millennia before the Common Era, there were several known examples of significant departures from the purely mythopoeic stage of medicine; on the other hand, the dominance of alternate forms of mythological beliefs and perspectives still dominated human medicine. By that time, astrologers offered what was then believed to be the "modern" view of medicine and of man's relationship to the external physical world, as depicted in the cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, the Egyptians had begun incorporating much more scientifically appropriate rational elements to explain human disease. Egyptian textbooks from as earl as 1600 BCE already began to resemble technical manuals for various surgical procedures, first-aid, and for diagnosing illness by identifying specific symptoms.

Despite the dominance of significant fundamental misunderstandings about the actual cause of disease, the Egyptians (and others) had achieved the crucial stage of distinguishing natural occurrences that were understandable rationally from medical consequences that were somehow attributable to the volitional will of angry gods and mythological spirits.

Even before the full departure from the mythopoeic stage of medicine, the ancient Romans had begun thinking about human health from a perspective that we would recognize today as community and public health systems. Roman doctors were paid by the state to treat anyone in need, and personal hygiene became an important concept based strictly on the apparent anecdotal connection between cleanliness and health.

Naturally, there still remained considerable room for error and conceptual misunderstanding: for one example, the early preoccupation with intestinal putrefaction as a major source of human disease. In that regard, there is, perhaps, no better example of the degree to which cultural learning still influences general perceptions about medicine. Specifically, the persistence of beliefs about intestinal putrefaction and the supposed cures for human disease and ill-health such as colon cleansers based on the same concept that are still a very large part of a billion-dollar-a-year "alternative health" industry in the United States despite the availability of state-of-the-art modern diagnosis and treatment of human disease.

Conclusion

The history of modern medicine is not one that traveled linearly; it is a history that represents overlapping stages of earlier influences and more modern approaches. Nor did medicine evolve uniformly in the entire human community. In most cases, even the best and most conceptually valid forms of pre-modern medicine provided a mixture of worthwhile concepts and methods along with those that either accomplished nothing or actually caused additional suffering.

Nevertheless, significant specific gaps in conceptual understanding greatly reduced the effectiveness of medicine before the 20th century. On its surface, modern medicine may appear to have no similarity to early medicine, but virtually every major aspect of modern medicine is directly traceable to specific periods of the history of medicine. Likewise, one can best understand the importance of external early social culture and society on the course of evolution of medical by simply considering the tremendous variation still present today in various beliefs about the proper applications of medicine, even the scientific conceptualization of medical issues is much more uniform.