Rebecca Greene - History of Medicine

Rebecca Greene, PhD, is a founding member of The Institute for Research in History. She earned her doctorate degree in History at Columbia University, and has held teaching positions at Colgate University, Lehman College, and the University of Maryland. Dr. Greene received a grant from the National Institutes of Health History of Medicine Program and is a Josia H. Macy Fellow in the History of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical Center.

First published by The Haworth Press, Inc.

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This edition published 2012 by Routledge

Trends in History, Volume 4, Numbers 2/3 1988.

Trends in History is a thematic journal copublished by The Institute for Research in History and by The Haworth Press.

The Institute for Research in History published Volume I, Numbers 1 and 2 of Trends in History in 1979. The Institute for Research in History and The Haworth Press copublished Volumes 2 and 3 on the following schedule: 2( 1) Fall 1981, 2(2) Winter 1981, 2(3) Spring 1982, 2(4) Summer 1982 3(1) Fall 1982,3(2) Winter 1982, and 3(3/4) Spring/Summer 1983.

Articles appearing in this serial arc annotated and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

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ISBN 0-86656-309-1 (hard: alk paper)

REBECCA GREENE

WILLIAM ZEISEL

HELENE AHRWEILER, University of Paris

MILDRED ALPERN, Spring Valley Senior High School, New York; Institute for Research in History

ANTHONY BRYER, University of Birmingham, England

ROBERT IGNATIUS BURNS, S. J., University of California, Los Angeles

BARBARA CUNNINGHAM, The Alternative School, Teaneck, New Jersey

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS, Princeton University

WALTER GOFFART, University of Toronto

NANCY HENNINGSEN, Packer Collegiate School, New York City; Institute for Research in History

JO ANN McNAMARA, Hunter College, City University of New York; Institute for Research in History

ANDRZEJ POPPE, University of Warsaw

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR., Graduate School, City University of New York

GILBERT SCHMERLER, The New Lincoln School, New York City

WILLIAM SINNIGEN, Hunter College, City University of New York

The Institute for Research in History is an independent community of scholars engaged in historical research, writing, and discussion. It is a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation chartered in the State of New York.

CAROL GRONEMAN

Central to this volume on the history of medicine is the question of definition. Is the history of medicine a compendium of translated texts and treatises in medicine; the study of the extent to which current medical practices or previously unknown practices existed in the past; or of disease in former times? Does it inquire into the development of medicine from the perspective of how ideas transformed logically over time? Does it examine the effects of society on medicine or of medicine on society? Does it trace transformations in the medical and allied professions, or differentiate between the medical treatment of men and women over time?

These questions are addressed wisely and energetically by the authors of this volume.

The volume begins with John Scarboroughs essay, Classical Antiquity: Medicine and Allied Sciences. In an unusually comprehensive fashion, Scarborough covers the texts, translations, biographies, journal articles on Greek, Hellenistic, and Byzantine medicine, surgery, pharmacology, and veterinary medicine. Scarborough reviews the philosophy of medicine in ancient Greece (such as the concept of humors) and the various Greek schools of medical thought. Among the medical leaders covered by Scarborough are Hippocrates of Greece and Galen of Rome. Referring to the literature on human anatomy and dissection in Hellenistic Greece, Scarborough asks the question: Why did the practice of dissection appear and end so abruptly, why was there no systematic dissection of cadavers after 220 B.C.? Belying the notion that the Byzantine PeriodA.D. 337 to 1453was a Dark Age for medicine, Scarborough notes the literature which traces the theory of the circulation of the blood to as early as the 10th century.

In Western Medieval Medicine, Faye M. Getz examines the extent to which scholars have located current, known diseases and their medical treatments in the Middle Ages while ignoring their historical context. Getz refers to the serious treatment of the passions of the martyrs as evidence of neuropathological afflictions, compared to a treatment of their behavior as reflective of the religiosity of the time; she also notes the examination by scholars of the extent to which leprosy and the black death of the Middle Ages had the same characteristics as modern leprosy and bubonic plague. Getz rightly observes that some scholars, while dwelling on how modern medical treatments and diagnoses can be employed in the interpretation of the past, have ignored the treatments and diagnoses then common but today no longer considered valid, or have failed to investigate why these forgotten techniques were then so popular. On the other hand, Getz acknowledges that historians of medicine have viewed medicine from a social historical perspective, for example, referring to the social impact of the black death on medieval prophecy and concepts on the millennium. The essay briefly refers to the literature on the regulation of medicine by the Church in the Middle Ages, and ends by asking if there was a womens medicine created by and for women in the Middle Ages.