How we understand illness and disease based
on nature and the gods is still disputed but continued to complement one
another into the Middle Ages. In
Christianity the marks and symptoms of illness and disease was seen as divine punishment,
corresponding illness was attributed to each of the seven deadly sins. It was
common for individuals to examine their moral conduct to determine how they had
brought illness and disease upon themselves, and a priest as well as a healer
would have been consulted, too often one man fulfilled the two roles. At the same time, the growth of medicine
depended on the corresponding emergence and spread of organized religions. Christianity taught that the physical body had
been corrupted after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and
also that the body belonged to God and had to be properly looked after.
In the 6th century BC, Susruta, the
founding father of Indian medicine, established a tradition later enshrined in
a classic test, the Susrutasamhita. He
identified 1120 diseases and listed down 760 medicinal drugs and stated that
Surgeon’s equipment that is needed for surgery of any kind has top 20 sharp
instruments which included knives, scissors, saws and needles and 101 blunt one
such as forceps, tubes, levers, hooks and probes. His explanation of how to rebuild a patient’s
nose gave him the status of the first plastic surgeon. This was one of the important operations that
was done in ancient India. At that time,
in India, amputation of the nose was also a punishment for adultery. One needs to understand here is that both
the theory in effect worked to the astonishment of all around them, could be
both the theory was based on one understanding of human body.
Cancer
is the word that mankind abhors when going for a diagnoses which they know that
will make their life take a U turn. The
origin of cancer has been a topic of debate by the medical fraternity,
pharmaceutical industries and the other side whom we can call the patients. The earliest reference to the disease cancer
is attributed to Egyptian physicians who lived around 2600 BC but most of the
ancient texts begs to differ on the precise origins of cancer and anatomically
accurate descriptions of the malignant tumors, according to them didn’t appear
until the very late 18th century and that it is likely reason that cancer is a
relative newcomer in the historical records of disease is that it mostly
commonly afflicts those 55 and older in those period. As much as the medical and pharmaceutical
industry would want us to believe that civilization did not cause cancer, all
the proof goes against it since evidence for cancer has always been elusive in
the fossil records all over the world.
