Religious Influence on Medicine in Ancient China and Greece
I chose On the Sacred Disease by Hippocrates, and The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine to show how differences in religious culture can radically affect medical concepts. Although the Hellenic Greeks and the Chinese during the Zhou Dynasty are living in the same time frame, they have drastically different lifestyles. The Chinese place much of their emphasis on living in balance with nature, and being sure not to disrupt the Yin and Yang of their everyday lives. On the contrary, the Hellenic Greeks focus on their physical world, as this is the basis for their philosophy and medicine. Exploring medical texts from two civilizations in the same time period can reveal how religious beliefs altar scienti
Instead of looking to the gods for answers to medical questions, he explains that there are simple, physical reasons for why people get sick. " When their rituals work, they take credit. Instead, medical ailments had very simple explanations. In On the Sacred Disease, Hippocrates criticizes the belief that epilepsy, and other diseases, are caused by spirits and mythical forces. Listing many examples, he shows how hypocritical these doctors can be with their rationalizations of physical disease. He also provides straightforward solutions to many ailments. It usually did not carry with them in their everyday actions. Any imbalance of these fluids was the cause for nearly all illnesses. In many ways, Greeks lived the religious part of their life only during temple ceremony. Religion in that time period was centered on worship of many gods, and had no formal system of religious rules, and Greeks were not concerned with the afterlife. He mocks the doctors who perform superstitious cures, calling them "magicians and quacks. Greek thought and culture was centered on the world around them, and this is reflected in the medicinal theories of that region. A lot of his beliefs stem from the culture around him.
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