What is the origin of medicine?

The social practice of preventing and treating diseases and safeguarding health has a history of thousands of years in ancient civilizations. People have accumulated a wealth of experience in long-term medical practice, and the systematic summarization of this experience has led to the formation of medicine.

In the early days of civilization, many medical activities were performed by clergymen, and explanations and treatments of diseases were often colored by religious superstition. Later, there was a gradual differentiation of medical personnel whose specialty was medicine. As civilization progressed, philosophical ideas gradually replaced theological explanations, and illness was no longer seen as a demonic infliction or divine punishment.

Acute seasonal illnesses were often linked to abnormal changes in the weather, while chronic slow-onset systemic illnesses were often explained as excesses, deficiencies, or imbalances in certain hypothetical components of the body. The treatments are a mixture of measures that have been empirically proven to be effective and many that are based on conjecture. These two phases have continued for thousands of years in the history of human civilization, and it is only in the last few centuries that modern medicine has been gradually established.

In ancient medicine, ancient Egyptian medicine and ancient Indian medicine had a brilliant time, but the only thing that has survived and is still expanding its influence is traditional Chinese medicine. Chinese traditional medicine is based on a broad foundation of medical practices of various ethnic groups in China, and in the process of long-term development, it has also had exchanges with Greco-Arabic medicine and Indian medicine.

Another part of ancient medicine that has had a significant impact on subsequent generations is ancient Greek medicine. In a certain sense, Roman and medieval Arabic medicine were continuations of it, while modern medicine is the result of its abandonment.

The ancient Greek school represented by Hippocrates abandoned theological explanations, and sought to seek the causes of disease in nature and the human body; this school of thought emphasizes clinical observation, promotes prevention, and emphasizes the adoption of measures to help the body heal naturally. These ideas are the historical roots of modern clinical medicine, and some of the ethical principles enunciated in the Hippocratic Oath are still practiced by physicians today.

On the other hand, the study of the human body in the Alexandrian school represents an early scientific exploration. But as the West entered the Middle Ages, superstition and feudalism stifled the development of scholarship, including medicine, and new explorations were often viewed as deviant, while the traditional, even if repeatedly proven false, was still held sacred and unquestioned, a situation that lasted until the Renaissance.

The Renaissance movement, which first appeared in Italy in the 14th century, did not merely represent a revival of ancient Greek culture, but actually reflected a deeper social change. The development of commerce and industry shook the feudal and theocratic rule; people got rid of the theological bondage, the idea of liberation; knowledge gradually popularized to the majority of the secular population, in the past the despised craft technology to get the attention of the emerging intellectual class. All this paved the way for the development of modern science.

In the field of medicine, scientific observation and experimentation first made people begin to have a more correct understanding of the structure and function of the human body, followed by clinical observation combined with the anatomical observation of the patient's cadaver, and put the understanding of the disease on the basis of the human body's pathology, and then the medical science has entered the era of scientization.

Medicine includes many scientific disciplines, their **** the same place are for human health care services. The scope of medicine is still expanding, and all the physical, chemical and biological knowledge and techniques that help diagnose, treat and prevent diseases will become the content of medicine. However, as the core of medicine, it is still clinical medicine and group medicine, which are aimed at individuals and groups, respectively.

Another component of medicine is basic medicine, which includes a number of disciplines that study the structure, function, heredity, and development of the human body, as well as a number of disciplines that study pathogens, immunity, and pathological processes, and the effects of drugs. Basic medicine is also a part of the general life sciences, it is basic medicine in recent years has made a leap forward, led to the entire medical stride forward.

Fundamentally, the health and happiness of the general population is the ultimate goal of all social practices, and the health of the population at the same time is the necessary guarantee of all human practical activities. Therefore, all countries in the world are vigorously developing medicine, and the level of medical development of a country is also regarded as an important symbol of the degree of modernization of this country.