The works of Alcmaeon of Croton

Alcmaeon, or Alkameon, or Alkmaion (’Aλχμαιων ´ ), a pre-Socratic physician–philosopher, lived in Croton around 520–450 BC. According to Diogenes Laertius, Alcmaeon of Croton wrote chiefly on medical subjects. Regarding the birth date, Aristotle says that Alcmaeon of Croton lived when Pythagoras was old.

Croton, which he came from, was a scientific metropolis thanks to excellent medical school, run by Alcmaeon for some time. In ancient times, Croton was considered an important cultural center, famous for the temple to Hera Lacinia built on the cape by the same name: “Lakinion àkron”. To this city – Democedes (one of the most famous doctors in Hellas) arrived to practice medicine for five years (c.530-525 BC).

He is likely to have written his book sometime between 500 and 450 BCE. The surviving fragments and testimonia focus primarily on issues of physiology, psychology, and epistemology and reveal Alcmaeon to be a thinker of considerable originality.

Alcmaeon probably conducted autopsies on animal organisms. In ancient times, he was considered as a father of anatomy, which is proof of his very knowledgeable.

He was the first to identify the brain as the seat of understanding and to distinguish understanding from perception. He believed that the brain was the center of emotions, knowledge, mind, and the soul. Further, he associated the functions of the sense organs with the brain.

Alcmaeon's theory based on the Pythagorean beliefs that the brain is a source of mind, soul, and logic, and the heart he called the place of formation of feelings. Alcmaeon wrote several books about medicine and natural sciences. Laertius (1853) indicates that the title of Alcmaeon’s most important book was De Natura or “Natural Philosophy.” De Natura was quoted frequently in ancient times and influenced Hippocrates, Herophilus, Plato, Galen, and others.
The works of Alcmaeon of Croton

Alexandria Medical School

Following the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) and the formation of new kingdoms by his successors, the center of Greek learning and medicine shifted from Athens and the Greek Islands to Alexandria in Egypt.

A famous medical school was established in old Alexandria during the third century BC. The Alexandria medical school introduced the notion that the level of understanding was dependent upon the detail of the observation.

The medical school was dominated by the ‘empirical’ outlook represented by Serapion of Alexandria (220 BC).

Anatomy was particularly advanced due to the possibility of dissecting the human body. Among the doctors attracted to work at Alexandria two were outstanding - Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos.

Herophilus of Chalcedon

Herophilus, the Elder, moved to Alexandria after initial training under Praxagoras. His greatest contributions to medical research were largely in anatomy and he conducted important investigations, based at times on human dissection, into the brain and nervous system, the vascular system, the liver, the eye and the reproductive organs.

Many graduates of this medical school traveled and practiced throughout the Mediterranean basin. Galen (131-210 AD), born of Greek parents in the region that is now Turkey, was influenced by the teachings of Alexandria and Greek schools of thought. He later moved to Rome where he developed a considerable following, Galen wrote over five hundred medical treatises of which over one hundred have survived into modern times.

The medical school of Alexandria was still active until late in the 3rd century AD. However, it slipped slowly into oblivion after the fire of 389 AD, which also devastated its famous library.
Alexandria Medical School

The School of Croton

Croton city prospered from Mediterranean commerce, especially between Greece and the coastal areas of Gaul and Spain. Croton was famous for her medical school and for the successes of her athletes.

There is no definite knowledge of when the medical school of Croton was established (probably existed before Pythagoras), in any case, its history is intertwined with that of Pythagoras and his school and two institutions made Croton the important Greek intellectual center in Italy. Of all early philosophical schools that of Pythagoras probably exerted the deepest influence upon medicine.

Pythagoras

In Croton, Pythagoras organized his followers into a well disciplined school, and scone medical school developed at about the same time, Croton became the first and a very important Greek intellectual.

According to Pythagoras, the soul is divided into three parts, intelligence reason and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals as well, but reason by man alone. The seat of the soul extends from the heart to the brain, the part of it which in the heart is passion, while the parts located in the brain are reason and intelligence.

One of the famous students graduated from this school was Alcmaeon of Croton. He was a student of anatomy and one of the first to perform dissection.
The School of Croton

Pre-classical Greek medicine

Greek medicine can be divided into two developmental phases: pre-classical medicine (1200-550 BC) and classical medicine (550-136 BC).

Pre-classical Greek medicine, like the early medicine of Sumer and Egypt was closely associated with magic and religion. Greek language has no world to describe health in a purely ‘clinical’ sense.

Seers, bards and healers were often thought to have magic, sacerdotal powers; Empedocles considered doctors to be ‘elevated even to the status of gods.’

Like other earlier peoples, the Greeks developed the idea that humans could placate the god’s anger through ritual and sacrifice and these practices formed the center of early Greek religion and medicine.

The Greeks believed that disease derived from an inner imbalance and not from outside pathogens. The key to good health was to maintain a balance of the bodily fluids, ‘The four humors’.

Health, healing and religious faith were regarded as one and the same the condition of mans was determined by the will of the gods or of daemons.

Most Greek physicians learned their craft through apprenticeship, though there were some written materials of the time providing clinical descriptions of diabetes, tetanus, diphtheria and leprosy.

The Greeks did not have hospitals, so patients were either treated at their own homes, at the home of a physician or at a shrine of Asclepius.

At the beginning of the fifth century BC, the most important centers of medicine were those of Croton and Sicily in Italy and those of Cos and Cnidus in Greece.
Pre-classical Greek medicine

Corpus Hippocraticum

The Corpus Hippocraticum was the first collection of important fragments of medical practice in early European history. Around 300 BC Pharaon Ptolemy Soter, the first of the Greek rulers in Egypt, ordered scholars at the new Library in Alexandria to collect documents containing all of human knowledge.

The works of Hippocrates, who was now acknowledged as the ‘father of medicine’, were among those most sought. They then tied a figurative knot around the package by attributing all of the writing to him.

The Corpus Hippocraticum or Hippocratic Collection is the name given to these writings. It is a library of about 60 works by different authors composed mostly between the late fifth and the fourth centuries BC. It reveals an approach to the problems of health and disease and in general a type of medicine such as the world had never seen before.

The Corpus Hippocraticum is full of richly detailed clinical information on the treatment of photophobia, excessive lacrimation, strabismus, nystagmus and a wide variety of external diseases.

The first known printed edition of the Corpus Hippocraticum was produced in 1525 by M. Fabius Calvus of Ravenna, who copied a single manuscript, Vaticanus Graecae 278, written in 1512. The Aldine edition was published in 1526 by Franciscus Anulanus and is considered the editio princeps.
Corpus Hippocraticum

Erasistratus of Ceos (325 BC – 250 BC)

Erasistratus was a Greek physician in Alexandria who helped establish the foundations for the scientific study of anatomy and physiology. Erasistratus was the son of Cretoxene, sister of the physician Medias and Cleombrotus.

It has been held that Erasistratus lived in Alexandria and the he practiced medicine there in the third century BC about 400 years before Galen. His works are lost for fragments quoted by other writers,

Erasistratus made numerous physiological and anatomical discoveries, perhaps using – like his contemporary Herophilus – an exceptional combination of human and animal dissection to explore the structure and workings of the human body.

Among his achievements, two in particular won high praise from later authors. First he described the heart valves, noting the irreversibility of the flow through the valves and detailing the heart’s pumping action. He supplied an excellent description of the bicuspid and tricuspid valves and their function in determining one-way flow through the heart.

Second, his account of the brain includes descriptions of its four ventricles, the convolution of the cerebrum and the cerebellum and the origin of the nervous system in the brain.

Erasistratus believed that all tissue in the body contains veins arteries and nerves and these vessels serve as channels by which various substances fundamental to the functioning of the body conducted to its various organs.

Erasistratus rejected the widespread Hippocratic theory of humoral medicine. Instead, he attributed disease to ‘plethora’ an excess of blood that produces inflammation and blocks the flow of pneuma.
Erasistratus of Ceos (325 BC – 250 BC)

Hippocrates and his oath

A native of the Dorian-Greek island of Kos, near south-western Asia Minor, Hippocrates is usually considered to be the founder of scientific medical practice.

In Hippocrates’s time, there were many people who claimed to be healers but had no formal training or medical knowledge. They would prey on the fears of the sick and would change for fraudulent cures.

The physicians of the Hippocratic School sought to distinguish themselves and establish trust with their patients. This is part of the inspiration for the Hippocratic Oaths.

Hippocratic Oath

The oath dates back to the fourth century BC and forms the basis of the western medical ethics. The Hippocratic Oath sums up the essential of what the Greeks thought should be reflected by a good physician and also what should be good medicine.

All new doctors coming out of the ancient Hippocratic School would take the Hippocratic Oath.

In this vow, the speaker swore to honor the brotherhood of the school, never to treat a patient with any purpose other than healing, never to give poison or induce abortion.

This oath established an ethical standard or personal and professional conduct for Hippocratic physicians that distinguished them from other unscrupulous or untrained people.
Hippocrates and his oath

History of common cold

3000 years ago, the Chinese treated olds with a tea brewed from the ma huang plant. This plant produces a chemical called ephedrine.

The common cold was known among the ancient American Indian, Aztec and Maya civilization.

The famous early Greek physician Hippocrates – who lived around 460 BC to 377 BC – believed colds occurred when ‘waste matter’ built in the brain.

When the waste matter overflowed, it caused runny noses. That is why the Greeks called the common cold catarrh, meaning ‘flow’.

During the first century Pliny the Elder suggested ‘kissing the hairy muzzle of a mule’ as therapy for colds.

At the same time in Rome, Celsus wrote about the common cold and prescribed a more popular remedy – flagons of good Italian wine.

The cold is discussed in Arabic works dedicated primarily to pharmacy and dietetics. A cold was thought to be caused by the cold in winter, but can be offset with appropriate clothing.

A summer cold, however, described by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), was caused by the seasonal heat, that ‘melted the hard excretions that are found in the brain and then they run down’.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hot drinks that raised a sweat were thought to be perfect antidote for the cold.

Ben Franklin declared that fresh air prevented colds, since he observed that colds were contracted by close contact with other cold sufferers.

It was not until first Walter Kruse and then Alphonse Donchez in the early part of the 20th century demonstrated that viruses caused the common cold.

The first isolation of human rhinovirus was reported by two laboratories in the late 1950s: Price in 1956 and Pelon and co-workers in 1957.
History of common cold  

Alcmaeon of Croton

By the middle of the fifth century BC there were three major centers Greek medical science: Croton (southern Italy), Agrigentum south coast Sicily) and Cos (island of Turkey).

The oldest of these medical centers was in Croton, and is most famous member was Alcmaeon.

Alcmaeon of Croton is the most important figure in the history of Greek medicine before Hippocrates. He was a Greek natural philosopher and physician significant for his theory of health and disease and for his investigations into the nature of the sense organs.

He was born in 510 BC and was a disciple of Pythagoras.

According to Chalcidius, Alcmaeon of Croton practices dissection and is said to have been the first man to make dissections. He was also the first to study the structure of the eye. He observed that the eye contained water. He also concluded that the eye contained light and that this light was necessary for vision

Alcmaeon of Croton was the first writer to champion the brain as the site of sensation and cognition.

He rejected earlier conceptions of disease as something possessing a separate existence of its own. He maintained that disease is due to the disturbance of the body’s natural equilibrium.
Alcmaeon of Croton

Dioscorides (AD 40 - 90)

Pedanius Dioscorides was born in Anazarbus which was part of the Roman province of Cilicia.

He was a Greek surgeon who served in Emperor Nero’s (AD 54-68) Roman Army and who, in the course of his military travels, complied what some consider to be the best description of medical botany to his name.

His great herbal was probably written around 60-78 BC, and mentioned 850 plants, animals, and minerals with discussion of their medical and non-medical uses. De Materia Medica described more than 600 plants with medical uses, 90 of which are still in use.

As an army physician, Dioscorides concentrated on soldier’s medicine, particularly wounds, But De Materia Medica also included a great deal of herbal folk wisdom.

De Materia Medica remained a standard reference for centuries and until the early 1600s, books on medical botany were little more than commentaries on Discorides’s work.

Until his classification was supplanted by that of Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century, he stood as the foremost authority on pharmacy for more than sixteen hundred years.

He was recognized not only by later Roman and Byzantium writers but also by Islamic scholars.
Dioscorides (AD 40 - 90)

Medicine in ancient Greek

Medicine in ancient Greek
It can be truly said that ‘modern’ rational medicine, divorced from the supernatural forces of possession by the devil or by evil surprises, was founded in Ancient Greece.

An important concept that influenced not only medical but also lay concept of disease was the humoral theory of Empedocles , develop by later Greek philosophers, in particular Aristotle.

This theory stated that everything derives from four elements – water, air, earth and fire – with their associated qualities respectively of wetness, coldness, dryness and heat.

With this theory, later writers combined the somewhat similar doctrine of Hippocrates which held that the body as composed of the four humors or fluids, black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm, with their associated temperaments – melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic.

A balanced of these humors determined the health of the individual and the subjects temperament also resulted from his prevailing humor this the sanguine, phlegmatic choleric or melancholic temperament.

To this day we still talk of an ‘aerial spirit’ or of a ‘fiery nature; and indeed this doctrine of the four elements persisted into the 17th century.

Much of our modern medical traditions and many of today’s medical terms derive form ancient Greek.

The Greek culture absorbed knowledge from Mesopotamia via Asia Minor and also form Egypt.

By the 6th century BC, medical schools were flourishing on the island of Cos and on the adjacent peninsula of Condos, which is now modern day Turkey.

The most famous medical teacher of Cos was the man who is commonly regarded as the ‘Father of Medicine’, Hippocrates.
Medicine in ancient Greek

Biography of Hippocrates

Biography of Hippocrates
Hippocrates is referred to ‘father of medicine’ in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic school of medicine.

Hippocrates was born to Heraclides, a physician and Praxitela, daughter of Phenaretis in year of 460 BC on the Greek island of Cos. He learned medicine from his own father and grandfather.

He also studied other subject with Democritus the Abderite and Gorgias of Leontini. Democritus was famous Greek materialist philosopher while Gorgias was famous philosopher and rhetorician at that time.

Hippocrates also trained at asklepieion (healing temple) of Kos and took lessons from Thracian physician Herodicus of Selymbria. Herodicus was Greek physician famous as the first person use of therapeutic exercise for treatment of disease and maintenance of health. Herodicus was described as gymnastic master.

Hippocrates later became a famous physician and teacher of medicine. He was regarded as the greatest physician of his time. He based his medical practice on observations and on the study of the human body.

He held the belief that illness had a physical and a rational explanation. Hippocrates held a belief that the body must be treated as a whole and not just a series of parts. Hippocrates was the first to give the physician an independent standing, separate from the cosmological speculator, or nature philosopher. Hippocrates confined the medical man to medicine.

He soon developed an Oath of Medical Ethics for physician. He died in 377 BC at the age of 90 years old. Some says at the age of 83 or 106 years He lies buried between Gyrton and Larissa.
Biography of Hippocrates