History of Herbs :: Greece
"The Secularization of Medicine"
To the Greeks, who viewed their pantheon of gods and goddesses as being directly involved with the day-to-day lives of
their people, illness and disease were seen as divine curse. For help to ease their suffering, they appealed to the great
Apollo, Asclepius, a mortal healer who was deified after his death and made the god of medicine and healing and Asclepius’
four daughters: Hygeia (Health), Iaso (Cure), Panacea (All healing) and Acesis (Remedy).
Early Greek medicine revolved around the temples of Asclepius. His priests were trained in herbal medicine, counseling, ritual and dream interpretation by their fathers whom they followed into the priesthood. Patients would arrive at the temples to consult with and be diagnosed by a priest who would then recommend a regime of exercise, massage, fasting and prayer specific to the ailment. It was not uncommon for a patient to spend many nights in the temple accompanied by Asclepius’ sacred animal – the snake. At night, patients were given brews that induced visions while they slept, the dreams were then interpreted by a priest as a divine diagnosis and a remedy prescribed. Sacrifice to court the gods favor and give thanks culminated the healing ritual.
The father of modern medicine was born on the Greek island of Kos, just off the coast of Turkey, in 460 BCE. Hippocrates
was born into a family of priests of Asclepius, but he developed a drastically different view of disease. Instead of seeing
illness as a curse from the gods, he saw it as being caused by environmental influences. He viewed the body functions as
being dependent on a balance of the four natural elements within the body. He associated the four body fluids: blood,
phlegm, yellow bile and black bile with fire, water, air and earth and maintained that illness was the result of an
imbalance of these fluids. Termed the Humoral Theory, Hippocrates’ hypothesis remained the dominant mode of thought in
Western medicine until the development of the Germ Theory in the 1800’s CE.
During Hippocrates’ day, the Doctrine of Signatures was an evolving theory. According to this hypothesis, nature herself was giving humans clues to the medicinal use of plants by the shape and color of the plant. Those with leaves shaped like lungs were used to treat reparatory illnesses, yellow rhizomes of rhubarb were used to treat jaundice and hepatitis and the red juice of a pomegranate was associated with blood disorders.
Hippocrates was the first physician to study the same illnesses in various people and to take note of the different effects drugs had on different patients. He examined his patients closely, something that was not common practice at the time, and encouraged his students to do the same. It was his students rather than himself, who compiled the Corpus Hippocriticum, which refers to 350 medicinal plants. The prescriptions in his book, his personal contact with patients, his high moral ethic and his philosophical view of medicine as an art rather than an exact science survived well past his death in Thessaly in 377 BCE. Modern American medical students still swear to uphold the Hippocratic Oath and the symbol of the medical profession is the caduceus, two of Asclepius’ snakes twined around a winged staff.
Theophratus was born five years after the death of Hippocrates and is often referred to as the father of botany. He cultivated his own herb garden and opened a successful pharmacy and herb shop in Athens. When his friend, the philosopher Aristotle, died he left his herb garden to Theophratus. The two books that Theophratus wrote, describing 550 herbs and their uses, Historia Planterium and DeCausis Plantarium would remain the standard used by physicians, herbalists, and botanists for 1,000 years.
The philosophical culture of the ancient Greeks encouraged intellectual exploration and allowed the first expansion in medical theory in hundreds of years. Rather than illness being a curse, it was now recognized that environment was a key factor to an individual’s physical health. This new approach to diagnosing environmental causes of disease and of working in direct contact with a patient is still practiced today. It also marks a significant departure in Western medicine, which would no longer focus on bringing the physical and spiritual into harmony within the individual. Some say this division is the greatest failure of modern medicine.
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