Greece and the Roman Empire
Greco-Roman medicine
Written works from the 5th century BCE
Greek medicine began not with physicians but with gods. In sanctuaries of Asclepius, such as at Epidaurus and on the island of Kos, the sick slept a night in the temple, hoping the god would heal them or give advice in a dream. In the fifth century BCE a different approach arose on Kos, associated with the name of Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE). The so-called Hippocratic writings, some sixty texts by different authors, seek the cause of illness not with the gods, but in the body, diet, climate and way of life. Others later built on this. In the fourth century BCE Theophrastus wrote the first great work on plants. In the first century CE the Greek army physician Dioscorides described some six hundred plants and their uses in De materia medica. Galen (129–c. 216), a physician from Pergamon who worked in Rome, brought everything together in a vast body of work that would shape European and Islamic medicine for more than fifteen hundred years.
