Ancient & Medieval Medicine: Crash Course History of Science #9

The history of medicine is about two of our big questions: one, what is life? What makes it so special, so fragile, so… goopy!?
Two, how do we know what we know? Why should I take my doctor’s advice? Why are deep-fried Oreos bad for me?
It may be tempting to look at medicine as a science that has simply progressed over time—that medicine used to be bad, and its history is a story of how it got better.

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[crazykaspmovies]

"A persistent cough you say? Must be all that pesky excess blood in your system, let me get my knife. I'll have you fixed up lickety split."

[larrylouie]

"Long ago the four humors live together in harmony, but then everything change when the yellow bile attacks..."

[rozinamouz]

I'm a greek girl studying medicine in english in a medival italian university. This feels strange.

[Carakav]

My takeaway from this is that Crash Course: Deep Fried Everything is coming.

[MajoraZ]

The Aztecs had a sort of humoral system the same way the ancient greeks (and later medieval Europe) did using "hot" or "cold" ingredients to treat different ailments. Despite the psuedo-scientific foundation, , the Aztec's still approached their treatments from an empirical, evidence based perspective, and as such actually had medical treatments that were effective. They also had extremely complex encyclopedias of plants and kept horticultural gardens to stock for this reason as well as just recreational, decorative botanical gardens such as in the imperial palace of Texcoco, one of the 3 ruling cities of the Aztec empire.

Cortes himself said in a letter to Charles V to not to bother to send doctors over, as the Aztec ones were far better, and Aztec horticultural and botanical texts were later adapted by Europeans and influenced later texts of the same nature and by taxonomists during the scientific revolution. They (most Mesoamerican cultures, really, but especially the Nahuas, who composed most of the core Aztec cities) were also OBSESSED with sanitation and cleanliness: Even commoners bathed using steam baths and the roots of plants as soap multiple times a week; in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, there were a fleet of civil servants that swept streets, washed buildings, and collected waste daily. Dual channel aqueducts were used to bring fresh water into the city, with one pipee being turned off and cleaned while the other was active, and multiple dikes were built across the lake it and other core cities were built on to keep fresh water on one side and the brackish water of the lake on the other, away from Tenochtitlan.

Gardens with flowers and other sweet smelling plants were located in communal public spaces and in noble homes to stave off smells, and feces collected by the civil servants were used as fertilizer, while urine was handled by the city's sewage system. Earlier cities in the region, such as Palenque and Teotihuacan (which, like Tenochtitlan, would have been in the top 5 largest cities in the world during their heydays, with Teotihuacan having a population of 100k to 150k and covering 60 square kilometers around 400ad, and Tenochtitlan having a population of 200k to 250k as of 1519, on par with Paris and Constantinople at the time, the largest cities in europe), both of which pre-date the Aztecs by 1000 years, also had flush toilets and sewage and other waterworks systems.

There's a great, easy to understand free tto download paper called "Public health in Aztec society" that goes over this, if anybody wants to read about it.

[kumargaurav]

India. A form of cataract surgery, now known as 'couching, was found in ancient India and subsequently introduced to other countries by the Indian physician Sushruta (ca. 6rd century BC), who described it in his work the Compendium of Sushruta or Sushruta Samhita

[hfar_in_the_sky]

"A woman figuring out how a woman's body works? That's just silly! Let's just write her out of this history book."

[davidrausch]

Here's what's freaking amazing about crash course (all of them)
it destroys and preconcieved notions of separation between human being and human culutres. its what we need please keep not forgeting to be awesome

[klassicneo]

Where do I go to fund the Crash Course Deep Fried Everything series?

[Nightheartchan]

When I took a class on early modern england, one of the subjects the professoer covered was how theyd racticed medicine, and she stressed that there was a silent but significat difference between teh theory of medicine and the practice of medicine. I was pleased to see the point brought up even by inference in this video, another fine job!

[eurmvdd]

Correction :
Alrazi didnt write a prophetic medicine (al-tib al-nabawi), Ibn Alqaim who was a theologian wrote it.
Nice episode 👍🏻

[drdurgeshmodi]

Love the series in general but this episode takes the cake (I am a doctor so I may be a little bit biased). So many Gregory Houses

[KFaria]

These have been the videos I have been waiting for each week. I love them!

[lapislazuli]

CrashCourse helped me maintain A's in every subject besides math and gym all through high school 😂. Great work as always.

[PaulDavid]

Very interesting information presented in the video, especially how medicine different across the world. Thank you Crash Course!

[Juliet_Capulet]

"Why are deep-friend Oreos bad for me..." (weeping softly)

[Telliria]

I cannot but recommend the episode on surgery from the podcast ‘How it began’ to delve a little deeper into the history of medicine.

[thamasteroneill]

People trying to science when there wasn't science yet. I just feel bad whenever I read about one of these early scientific type thinkers struggling in the dark. But I also feel heartened that there have always been inquisitive minds, and there will always be. I personally wouldn't say there was much of an increase in quality of healthcare from antiquity till the scientific revolution. People were operating under a veil of profound ignorance and it could be fairly stated that depending on what system was popular at a given time you would end up worse of by going to a doctor. And it isn't the fault of the doctors either. These would be people trying their hardest to be "healers of men".
I remember seeing ancient Roman surgical tools that looked allot like what we might use today (clamps and scalpel like objects). This shows that the trade was real and practiced by professionals. And you can easily see it starting on animals and moving on to humans over time. But just imagine having to go to a surgeon in a time when disinfecting tools wasn't a thing. When people didn't really know what the various organs were for. When most people including doctors thought life was a force and death could cause miasma's most easily imagined as evil air like you might see in children's cartoons.
A time when the ideas that became professional wisdom were mostly there due to their intuitive nature or because of the authority of it's proclaimer. Rather than it's accuracy.
Just imagine what humanity could have achieved by now had we put the basic method of science into action around 2500 years ago. (peer review and empiricism)

[blitzwaffe]

"And his name was X which also happened to mean Gregory House" should be a meme.

[feynstein]

On the next episode: lupus. Proceeds to wait forever for the episode.