world of MEDICINE
Medicine is among the most ancient of human occupations.
Evidences of the practice of ritual healing, combining religion and primitive
science, are found in the earliest traces of communal living. Until the period of
the Enlightenment, medical science and technology advanced at a relatively slow
and steady rate in the world's major cultures. With the birth of modern science
and the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the progress of medicine also began
to accelerate. In spite of the breathtaking rapidity of modern developments,
however, the history of medicine is all of a piece. Hippocrates would quickly
have appreciated that contemporary practices are founded on principles similar
to medicine in his day.
The greatest fears of man are those
of pain, disease and death. His foremost desires are for happiness, contentment
and good health. The expansion of medical knowledge in recent times has been
truly staggering. More has been learned in the past about the human body and
the diseases which afflict it than in all of previous human history.
Primitive human beings, even the
first living creatures used their instincts in natural events such as the
changes of climate, winds, floods, earthquakes and in the cases of diseases or
injuries. But instincts of men developed by passing from various metaphysical,
mystical, religious and empirical stages and they reached for modern medicine
of today.
No history of any art
can be more dramatic than that of medicine, for there is hardly an aspect of
life and of society upon which it does not touch. The medicine counts certainly
among the oldest achievements of the human culture and science. Through
millennia it has served the humanity, its way through the history accompanies,
thereby changed, changes and renews always. The already so old medicine will be
always young, as long as the people need it. As long as there are human beings,
there will be medicine. Therefore the medicine, which was created by the humanity
for the people, is the answer on an elementary being of the people, with whom
it was confronted always already and it will be also in future. We call it to
be ill....
