Classical Studies 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Smallpox, Theogony, Tityos
Document Summary
Greek medicine is significant in the role it plays in helping us to think about the contribution of the greeks to modern medicine. The contribution, however, is negligent: hippocratic corpus is an ancient medical text that outlines diseases and analyses them. There is only one treatment, however, that means constant to the modern world (fracture reduction): these texts show how the greeks thought about the world and the body. Slide: hippocrates may or may not have been a real doctor. Asclepius is a greek god of healing: this shows us that the greeks don"t look as medicine just as semi-scientific but it is also a facet of their religion. Hippocrates seems to have been a real person and a contemporary of socrates: the status of physicians is different from today. Today being a doctor is a high status profession but in ancient greece this wasn"t always the case and they were often suspect characters.