Fjordman: A History of Medicine, part II

Atlas exclusive ….. Fjordman’s fresh, brilliant analysis of the history of medicine. Brussels Journal ran Fjordman’s  A History of Medicine in the Islamic World. — Part 1 (read that first)

Fjordman: A History of Medicine, part 2

Vesalius’ book On the Fabric of the Human Body from
1543 was made widely known in the West due to the introduction of Gutenberg’s
printing press a few generations earlier, an invention that was aggressively
rejected in the Islamic world. According to Toby Huff, "there was in
Arabic-Islamic civilization a strong distrust of the common man," and efforts
were made to prevent his gaining access to printed material.

Story continues below advertisement

The fact that the ancients generally didn’t practice
dissection of human corpses may surprise us today. After all, the Romans
regularly watched gladiators kill each other or prisoners being eaten by lions.
They certainly weren’t squeamish. However, there were religious and cultural
taboos against this practice in many cultures around the world, and few cultures
before Renaissance Europe conducted dissection for the purpose of understanding
the human body in a scientific way.

In Science and Religion, Edward Grant puts it this way:
"Up to Plato’s time, the Greeks viewed the dead human body as sacred, and they
firmly believed that it had to be properly buried, fearing that if this duty was
neglected, the corpse would take vengeance on those relatives who had abandoned
their solemn responsibilities. Hence, dissection would have been regarded as the
mutilation of a dead body and was, therefore, considered unthinkable. The Greeks
also placed great emphasis on the ‘body beautiful’ and always thought in terms
of preserving the body rather than mutilating it. Plato’s attitude was radically
different. He regarded the human soul as far more important than the body: the
soul was immortal, whereas the body was perishable."

Plato’s student Aristotle did not share all of his teacher’s
ideas and did his best work when he performed empirical investigations of
nature, something which Plato largely rejected in favor of pure reason applied
to eternal ideas or forms separate from physically observable reality.

David C. Lindberg explains: "Plato had drastically
diminished (without totally rejecting) the reality of the material world
observed by the senses. Reality in its perfect fullness, Plato argued, is found
only in the eternal forms, which are dependent on nothing else for their
existence. The objects that make up the sensible world, by contrast, derive
their characteristics and their very being from their forms; it follows that
sensible objects exist only derivatively or dependently. Aristotle refused to
accept this diminished, dependent status that Plato assigned to sensible
objects. They must exist fully and independently, for in Aristotle’s view they
were what make up the real world."

Aristotle is often regarded as one of the first, if not the
first, biologist, but his focus was on zoology and animal biology, especially
that of marine animals. In this he was brilliant and could still be viewed with
respect by modern biologists well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
long after his ideas had been debunked and were viewed as an obstacle to
progress in astronomy and theories of motion. Still, he never developed the
experimental method as we know it from early modern
Europe. None of the ancient cultures did, not
even the Greeks, although a few of them did make some initial steps in this
direction.

Aristotle dissected numerous animals, but he did not try to
break the long-standing taboo against dissecting the human body. In History
of Animals,
he states that while we know the arrangement of the
external parts of the human body, "this is not the case with the inner parts.
For the fact is that the inner parts of man are to a very great extent unknown,
and the consequence is that we must have recourse to an examination of the inner
parts of other animals, whose nature in any way resembles that of
man."

Plato’s attitude toward the dead human body proved
influential outside of
Greece
when physicians of the Dogmatist school in Greek-dominated, Ptolemaic Alexandria
not only overcame fear of the dead body but, in the third century BC, also took
the dramatic step of dissecting it and perhaps even vivisecting it. G.E.R. Lloyd
says about Greek medicine that "Galen reports that two of the chief medical
sects, those he calls Dogmatists and Empiricists, agreed, generally, about
therapies, but quarrelled about their justification and explanation."

Writing in Rome in the first century AD, Aulus Cornelius
Celsus, author of the important treatise On Medicine (De
medicina
), charged the two most famous Dogmatist physicians in Alexandria,
Herophilus of Chalcedon (b. c. 330 BC) and Erasistratus of Iulis (b. c. 304 BC)
of practicing vivisection, the dissection of living animals, or in this case,
humans. This has not been conclusively demonstrated, although in Grant’s view it
is likely that they did so. As G.E.R. Lloyd has plausibly conjectured: "When we
reflect that the ancients regularly tortured slaves in public in the law courts
in order to extract evidence from them, and that Galen, for example, records
cases where new poisons were tried out on convicts to test their effects, it is
not difficult to believe that the Ptolemies permitted vivisection to be
practiced on condemned criminals."

Celsus, and Christian authors such as Tertullian and
Augustine, reproached the Dogmatists for cruelty. Herophilus and Erasistratus
dissected the bodies of executed criminals whose bodies were handed over to them
on the authority of the Ptolemaic kings of
Egypt. Herophilus showed that the brain is
the center of the nervous system and the seat of intelligence, not the heart as
Aristotle had believed, as well as the ancient Egyptians. He distinguished
between arteries and veins and described the optic nerves and retina in the eye.
Erasistratus added to our knowledge of anatomy, too, describing the function of
the epiglottis and distinguishing between motor and sensory nerves.

The Egyptians removed some of the internal organs during the
process of mummification, which obviously meant that they had at least a
rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy. Yet as Edward Grant points
out:

"Although the ancient Egyptians had also cut into the human
body in order to embalm dead pharaohs, as well as members of the higher
nobility, these cuttings were for religious purposes, to preserve dead pharaohs
in an eternal afterlife. The objectives of the Greek physicians differed
radically from their Egyptian predecessors. They dissected human cadavers for
the sole purpose of learning about the internal organs of the human body. The
Greeks used dissection, and perhaps vivisection, for scientific purposes,
whereas the ancient Egyptians used it for religious purposes. Unfortunately, the
vivisections of prisoners, who were regarded as worthless and expendable, are
deplorable even if they provided useful medical information. It reminds us too
vividly of medical experiments performed by Nazi physicians on concentration
camp victims and prisoners of war in World War II during the last
century."

Bruce S. Thornton, American classicist and author, points out that
philosophy, history, logic, physics, criticism, rhetoric, dialectic, dialogue,
tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, analysis and democracy are all Greek words and
expressions of critical consciousness. While medical writings from the ancient
civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were still subordinated to superstition,
"Greek medical writers for the most part ignored supernatural explanations and
focused instead on their own observations and the consistent patterns of
nature." For instance, a Hippocratic work indicates that epilepsy has a natural
cause rather than divine origins, which was commonly assumed at the time. The
physician Hippocrates (fifth century BC) is often referred to as the Father of
Medicine in the Western tradition, and the Hippocratic Oath regarding the
ethical practice of medicine is still taken by many physicians today.

It is true that the Greeks learned from other cultures. They
learned much about mathematics and astronomy from the cultures of Mesopotamia,
in particular the Babylonians, who were more advanced in this field than most
other ancient civilizations in the Old World. The Egyptians were sophisticated
for their time in medicine, obviously in order to treat the living, but most
famously in order to embalm and preserve the dead. Their art was also focused on
this objective, as opposed to later Greek art, which diverged radically from
that of their Egyptian teachers by depicting the human body in much more
realistic ways.

This has been explained by E.H. Gombrich in his classic The Story of Art. The Egyptians believed that the body
must be preserved if the soul is to live on in the beyond. Yet preservation of
the body was not enough. If the likeness of the king was also preserved, it was
doubly sure that he would continue to exist forever, hence one Egyptian word for
sculptor was actually "he-who-keeps-alive."

According to Gombrich, "This combination of geometric
regularity and keen observation of nature is characteristic of all Egyptian art.
We can study it best in the reliefs and paintings that adorned the walls of the
tombs. The word ‘adorned’, it is true, may hardly fit an art which was meant to
be seen by no one but the dead man’s soul. In fact, these works were not
intended to be enjoyed. They, too, were meant to ‘keep alive’." Moreover, "What
mattered most was not prettiness but completeness. It was the artists’ task to
preserve everything as clearly and permanently as possible. So they did not set
out to sketch nature as it appeared to them from any fortuitous angle. They drew
from memory, according to strict rules which ensured that everything that had to
go into the picture would stand out in perfect clarity. Their method, in fact,
resembled that of the map-maker rather than that of the painter."

This
all changed in Greece, especially in city-states such as democratic Athens
between 520 and 420 BC, the age of Socrates and his contemporaries. "It was
here, above all, that the greatest and most astonishing revolution in the whole
history of art bore fruit." Greek artists studied Egyptian art, but experimented
and decided to look for themselves instead of following an old, ready-made
formula. This led to the discovery of natural forms and of foreshortening.
Likewise, in science, their attitude was different from that of older
civilizations.

The oldest mummies in the world have been found in South
America, in Chile and Peru. Mummification in ancient Egypt is first known from
the Old Kingdom, at the time when the great pyramids were built, but the
practice wasn’t fully developed until later. The brain was removed by a hooked
rod through the nose. The body was later placed in natron, especially from the
Middle Kingdom onwards, which dehydrated it in order to preserve it. It was then
wrapped in many layers of linen strips. While the brain was understood to be
unimportant, the heart was the seat of the soul and was kept untouched as
it was supposed to be weighed by the god Anubis during the
Weighing of the Heart ceremony. Several other organs were removed and put
into canopic jars, which were buried together with the sarcophagus.

The German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius was one of the
nineteenth-century founders of Egyptology as a scientific discipline, following
the early death of Jean-François Champollion who had deciphered the hieroglyphs.
Lepsius coined the name the "Book of the Dead," a collection of spells and
descriptions of the afterlife which was placed in the coffin or burial chamber.
The Book of the Dead was the culmination of an evolution from the so-called
Pyramid texts, which were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of some of the
pyramids at Saqqara. During the Old Kingdom, spells were only for the pharaoh
and were not illustrated.

According to the useful website Digital Egypt, "In the far richer days of the New Kingdom
(about 1550-1069 BC) more objects, such as funerary papyri and canopic jars,
were produced as tomb goods. The tradition of placing objects of daily use in
tombs continued. From no other periods were so many different objects
(furniture, jewellery) placed in tombs. The New Kingdom is a period of advances
in securing good results from mummification." They warn that "Too often ‘ancient
Egypt’ is treated in general books as a monolithic block, nowhere more so than
in coverage of funerary archaeology. There is no such phenomenon as ‘the ancient
Egyptian burial’ as a general type: burial customs evolved continuously
throughout Egyptian history."

"Ancient Egypt" refers to a very long period of time with
many changes in customs, though with a remarkable artistic continuity. The
protodynastic period or Dynasty 0, when Upper and Lower Egypt were first united
into one state, begins around the year 3100 BC, or 3000 BC at the very latest.
The time period from there until the end of the New Kingdom in the eleventh
century BC amounts to more than 2000 years, which is roughly the same amount of
time as separates us from Queen Cleopatra VII, the least of the independent
rulers of Egypt. After the murder of Gaius Julius Caesar, the Battle of Actium
marked the defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, the triumph of Augustus Caesar
and the shift from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. This did not spell
the immediate end of traditional Egyptian culture. Mummification was carried out
into the early Christian era, as long as the Egyptian religion was still
practiced. Some Greek and Roman residents in Egypt were also
mummified.

According to The New Penguin History of the World by J. M.
Roberts, technologically speaking, ancient Egypt was "neither very fertile nor
very responsive," even if it had impressive stone architecture. The wheel was
adopted curiously late, but the country has been credited with inventing the
water-clock, whose basic mechanism was to undergo millennia of elaboration in
later cultures in the region.

Nevertheless, "many important devices came to Egypt only
much later than elsewhere. There is no solid evidence of the presence of the
potter’s wheel before the Old Kingdom; for all the skill of the goldsmith and
coppersmith, bronze-making does not appear until well into the second millennium
BC and the lathe has to wait for the Hellenistic age. The bow-drill was almost
the only tool for the multiplication and transmission of energy available to the
mass of Egyptian craftsmen. Only in medicine is there undisputable originality
and achievement and it can be traced back at least as far as the Old
Kingdom."

Hieroglyphs are important in world history since a Semitic
people invented the ancestor of our alphabet based on a limited number of
hieroglyphs, but the writing system itself was adopted by very few people
outside of Egypt, in contrast to the more popular cuneiforms invented by the
Sumerians. More important was the writing material used by the Egyptians, which
was radically different from Sumerian clay tablets. According to J. M.
Roberts:

"From pre-dynastic times it was used for historical record
and as early as the First Dynasty the invention of papyrus – strips of
reed-pith, laid criss-cross and pounded together into a homogeneous sheet –
provided a convenient medium for its multiplication. This invention had much
greater importance for the world than hieroglyph; cheaper than skin (from which
parchment was made) and more convenient (though more perishable) than clay
tablets or slates of stone, it was the most general basis of correspondence and
record in the Near East until well into the Christian era, when the invention of
paper reached the Mediterranean world from the Far East (and even paper took its
name from papyrus). Soon after the appearance of papyrus, writers began to paste
sheets of it together into a long roll; thus the Egyptians invented the book, as
well as the material on which it could first be written and a script which is an
ancestor of our own. It may be our greatest debt to the Egyptians, for a huge
proportion of what we know of antiquity comes to us directly or indirectly via
papyrus."

Egypt was less urbanized than Mesopotamia, which partly
accounts for it being less culturally dynamic, as scientific advances often
happen in cities. Ancient Egypt has sometimes been called "a civilization
without cities," which isn’t true, but it did tend to be dominated by a few
great cult and administrative centres such as Thebes or Memphis. The Egyptians
were widely credited – and sometimes criticized by the Greeks and the Romans –
with having comparatively greater freedom for women. Positions of power and
political authority were largely dominated by men here as elsewhere, though.
Only rarely did women occupy the Egyptian throne in their own name, Hatshepsut
of the 18th dynasty in the New Kingdom (r. perhaps 1479–1458 BC)
being the most prominent exception.

In medicine, the Egyptians recorded diseases and remedies,
but like in Mesopotamia, magic and religion heavily intertwined with practical
advice. They had some understanding of sanitary principles and their houses
contained water closets with wastewater being carried to the street in copper
pipes.

As Roberts says, "Egypt provides our oldest surviving
medical treatises, and their evidence of prescriptions and recommended cures
suggests that Egyptian practitioners could offer a mixed bag of remedies, no
better and no worse than most of those deployed in other great centres of
civilization at any time before the present (is seems that much emphasis was
long laid on purging and enemas). Considerable preservative skill was attributed
to the practitioners of mummification, though unjustifiably since the climate
was on their side. Curiously, the products of their art were later themselves
regarded as of therapeutic value; powdered mummy was for centuries a sovereign
cure for many ills in Europe. It is interesting, too, that Egyptians devised and
used certain rudimentary contraceptive techniques. Whether these had any
efficacy in reducing the risk of over-population and therefore of the likelihood
of infanticide remains wholly unknown and speculative."

They passed on some of their medical ideas to others, and
"much of our knowledge of drugs and of plants furnishing materia medica
was first established by the Egyptians and passed from them, eventually, through
the Greeks to the scientists of medieval Europe. It is a considerable thing to
have initiated the use of a remedy effective as long as castor oil."

The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians, consumed considerable
amounts of alcoholic beverages, both wine and beer. As Patrick E. McGovern
writes in Ancient Wine: "Why have cultures around the world had a
millennia-long love affair with wine, once they have been introduced to it? The
short answer to this question is that ethyl alcohol has been the most effective
drug of all time. And before the discovery of distillation, a potent form of
this compound could be most expeditiously obtained from grapes by making
wine."

Alcohol could have medical uses, too. McGovern again: "Wine
was the prime medicinal agent of the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds,
up to the nineteenth century. Then, other curative compounds, which were
isolated and purified by chemical methods or synthesized, began to displace it.
It was the most common ingredient in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Syrian
medicines, which was readily administered by drinking or external application.
Most important, people who drank alcoholic beverages, as opposed to straight
water, in antiquity were more likely to live longer and reproduce more. As Paul
advised Timothy (I:5.23): ‘No longer drink only water, but take a little wine
for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.’ Ancient armies were
‘inoculated’ against disease by mixing wine with the uncertain water supplies
that they came upon in their journeys. In addition to the alcohol, the
polyphenolic aromatic compounds in wine have antiseptic properties. These
antioxidants, including resveratrol, cyanidin, and quercetin, are stronger even
than the chemically related phenol or carbolic acid, the antiseptic that the
English surgeon Joseph Lister introduced in the late nineteenth
century."

Because of its alcoholic content, wine was an excellent
medium for dispensing other medical agents. Moreover, "Ancient humans did not
understand the ‘germ theory of disease’ or the inner workings of the cell. To
survive in the world, however, they did need to discern cause-and-effect
relationships, some of which have stood the test of time. Wine is arguably their
greatest legacy to the modern world. Its psychotropic effects and medicinal
value, owing to alcohol, largely accounted for its central role in society,
religion, and the economy."

Distillation of nearly pure alcohol is believed to have been
an invention of medieval times. Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber in Latin) in
the late eighth and early ninth centuries AD developed new methods in alchemy,
which were influential in the Middle East and centuries later in Europe, as his
work was translated into Latin. He made experiments with heating wine, which
eventually led to the breakthroughs of Rhazes and others in distillation. These
advancements in the Islamic world seem to have been inspired by earlier
traditions of the Greeks, which again were influenced by other
cultures.

Some rudimentary form of distillation probably existed in
ancient times, and was employed in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean
during the manufacture of perfume. A tradition for making perfume existed in
China and East Asia, too, but these perfumes were not alcohol-based. In
Mesopotamia, the Babylonians did practice an early form of chemistry. A
cuneiform tablet from the second millennium BC (ca. 1200 BC) mentions a
perfume-maker called Tapputi, who is the first chemist we know by name. In 2007,
a team of archaeologists in
Cyprus discovered one
of the world’s oldest perfume "factories." Dozens of distilling stills, mixing
bowls, funnels and perfume bottles were found preserved at the site, which had
been blanketed in earth after a violent earthquake around 1850 BC. Cyprus in
ancient Greece had the mythological status as the birthplace of Aphrodite, the
goddess of love.

Regarding anatomical knowledge in the ancient world, the
work of Herophilus and Erasistratus has been highlighted precisely because it
constitutes an exception. The general rule – and we know of very few exceptions
– is that scientific study of human anatomy through dissection simply wasn’t
done in antiquity. Although their research left some impact, Galen later based
his knowledge largely on animal anatomy. His errors were transmitted to the
Islamic world and went largely unchallenged there, whereas they were eventually
corrected in Renaissance Europe. It is true that some of Galen’s works were
reintroduced into Western Europe through Arabic translations, but what is
important to remember here is that the attitudes of Christian Europeans towards
his work were different from those of Muslims.

Galen’s works had been translated by a Nestorian (Assyrian)
Christian named Hunayn ibn Ishaq, or Johannitius in Latin. Hunayn ibn Ishaq had
studied Greek by living in Greek lands, presumably in the Byzantine Empire, and
was put in charge of translations in Baghdad. Soon, he, his son and his nephew
had made available in Arabic and Syriac Galen’s medical treatises as well as
Hippocrates and texts by Aristotle, Plato and others. In some cases, he
translated a work into Syriac and his son Ishaq translated this further into
Arabic. Most senior medical doctors in the Islamic world were later influenced
by these translations of Greek medicine.

Even Dimitri Gutas in his generally pro-Islamic book Greek Thought, Arab Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation
Movement in
Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society
(2nd-4th/8th-10th
 admits that
Christians and Jews held a disproportionate amount of expertise in the medical
field. The Abbasid dynasty was clearly influenced by pre-Islamic,
Persian-dominated culture in areas such as translation and libraries, and
"Medicine was one of the earliest fields cultivated by scholars whose background
lay in the Sasanian cultural field of influence."

The Christian medical families whose roots lay in the
pre-Islamic Middle East continued to wield significant influence, for a while,
into the Islamic period. As Gutas says: "These families formed a closely knit
social unit in Baghdad: their mother tongue was Persian, as Nestorian Christians
their liturgical and scientific language was Syriac, and they intermarried with
each other. In addition to practicing medicine in the ‘Abbasid court, however,
they also engaged in medical research, wrote medical textbooks, and, most
importantly, commissioned translations. They definitely had a stake in
maintaining their scientific superiority because their high social status as
caliphal physicians and the consequent wealth they amassed depended on their
medical expertise."

Although the content of their education was often in Greek,
their language of instruction was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the lingua
franca of the Middle East since the Assyrians and the first Persian Empire a
thousand years earlier (it was eventually replaced by Arabic after the Islamic
conquests). Some translations of Greek texts into Syriac were made already in
the fifth century, long before the advent of Islam. Moreover, this region had
been exposed to Greek philosophy and ideas at least since the age of Alexander
the Great, although the diffusion of these ideas had admittedly sometimes been
slow. It is true that the translation movement in Baghdad was unusual in
concentration and intensity.

The Nestorians managed to retain their medical excellence
for centuries, during the so-called golden age of "Islamic medicine." According
to scholar Thomas T. Allsen, in the vast Mongol Empire in the thirteenth
century, "The flow of West Asian medicine eastward in the thirteenth century is
closely linked to the presence of Eastern Christian and, more particularly,
Nestorian communities in central Asia and China, communities that were well
established, connected by local and regional networks, and which exercised
considerable political influence."

Middle Eastern/West Asian medicine in Yuan (Mongol ruled)
China was "almost always" in the hands of Nestorians: "Nestorians in the East
were closely associated with the medical profession. A considerable body of
Syriac medical literature, some in the original and some in translation, has
been recovered in central Asia. This is hardly surprising, because Eastern
Christians were an important fixture in West Asian medicine." In Allsen’s view,
"To some extent this duplicated and perpetuated the situation in West Asia,
where Nestorians had long played a prominent and recognized role in the medical
professions, particularly as court physicians."

It should be mentioned here that the so-called golden age of
"Islamic science and medicine" overlaps with the period when non-Muslims and
their pre-Islamic culture still constituted a substantial part of the
population. As their position gradually deteriorated and their numbers declined
due to Muslim discrimination, harassment and Jihad, "Islamic science" declined
and never recovered, which indicates that it never was very "Islamic" to begin
with. This is not to say that Muslims did no improvements at all. Abu al-Qasim
Khalaf ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936 – 1013), or Abulcasis as he is known in the
West, was a physician Cordoba, Spain, who is credited with having invented
several new surgical instruments. He was one of very few good surgeons in
Islamic world. His work was translated and had some influence in
Europe.

However, as Robert Spencer puts it in his excellent book Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam
Isn’t
: "In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic
culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority
corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to take the
achievements of the Byzantines and others that they conquered. But after the
Muslim overlords had stripped Jewish and Christian communities of their material
and intellectual wealth, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from
which it has not yet recovered."

As Rodney Stark states in The Victory of Reason: "Islamic scholars
achieved significant progress only in terms of specific knowledge, such as
certain aspects of astronomy and medicine, which did not require any general
theoretical basis. And as time passed, even this sort of progress
ceased."

What of the creation of hospitals? Didn’t Muslims excel at
that? They did build a number of institutions that could be labelled hospitals,
but again, these had pre-Islamic precedents. According to David C. Lindberg: "An
influential mythology has developed around Nestorian activity in the city of
Gondeshapur (often written ‘Jundishapur’) in southwestern Persia. According to
the often-repeated legend, the Nestorians turned Gondeshapur into a major
intellectual center by the sixth century, establishing what some enthusiasts
have chosen to call a university, where instruction in all of the Greek
disciplines could be obtained."

The city is also supposed to have included a medical school
and a hospital, making the pre-Islamic Persians among the inventors of the
hospital system. However, according to Lindberg:

"Recent research has revealed a considerably less dramatic
reality. We have no persuasive evidence for the existence of a medical school or
a hospital at Gondeshapur, although there seems to have been a theological
school and perhaps an attached infirmary. No doubt Gondeshapur was the scene of
serious intellectual endeavour and a certain amount of medical practice – it
supplied a string of physicians for the ‘Abbasid court at Baghdad beginning in
the eighth century – but it is doubtful that it ever became a major center of
medical education or of translating activity. If the story of Gondeshapur is
unreliable in its details, the lesson it was meant to teach is nonetheless
valid. Nestorian influence, though not focused on Gondeshapur, did play a vital
role in the transmission of Greek learning to Persia and ultimately to the
Muslim empire. There is no question that Nestorians were foremost among the
early translators; and as late as the ninth century, long after Persia had
fallen to Islamic armies, the practice of medicine in Baghdad seems to have been
dominated by Christian (probably Nestorian) physicians."

One of the difficulties in tracing the origin of the
hospital is deciding what you mean by the term "hospital." Lindberg
again:

"If, by ‘hospital,’ we mean anything called ‘hospice’ or
‘hospital,’ then we include many institutions that offered food and shelter to
paupers and pilgrims, including the sick, but which provided little or no
specialized medical care. If, however, we wish to reserve the term for
institutions dedicated to the treatment of the sick, including the provision of
skilled medical care, then we are applying a much more stringent criterion. The
former sort of hospital, which was common throughout medieval Europe (often
maintained by monasteries or communities of lay brethren), will not interest us.
It is the latter kind of institution that will be the object of our attention.
Where, then, did the hospital as a medical institution come from? Its origins
seem to lie in the Byzantine Empire, where, probably about the fourth century,
ideals of Christian charity led to the establishment of hospitals that provided
specialized medical care. One of the earliest for which we have hard evidence
was the Sampson hospital (named after a saint of the fourth century) in
Constantinople; here, early in the seventh century, for example, a church
official suffering from a groin infection was hospitalized for surgery and
convalescence."

Other Byzantine hospitals were organized along the same
lines, and the Byzantine model of hospitals became known in the West and the
Islamic world, where it interacted with and helped shape the indigenous
traditions of healthcare. These ideas spread to the West especially after the
Crusades.

In How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization,
Thomas E. Woods Jr writes about Christian charity and how this did not exist in
the Greco-Roman world. The Stoics taught that man enjoyed a spirit of fraternity
with all men, but they showed little compassion, according to him. Rodney Stark
describes classical philosophy as having "regarded mercy and pity as
pathological emotions – defects of character to be avoided by all rational men.
Since mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to
justice."

According to W. E. H. Lecky, frequently a harsh critic of
the Church, there can be "no question that neither in practice nor in theory,
neither in the institutions that were founded nor in the place that was assigned
to it in the scale of duties, did charity in antiquity occupy a position at all
comparable to that which it has obtained by Christianity. Nearly all relief was
a State measure, dictated much more by policy than by benevolence, and the habit
of selling young children, the innumerable expositions, the readiness of the
poor to enroll themselves as gladiators, and the frequent famines, show how
large was the measure of unrelieved distress."

As Woods says, "It is open to debate whether institutions
resembling hospitals in the modern sense can be said to have existed in ancient
Greece and Rome. Many historians have doubted it, while others have pointed out
an unusual exception here and there. Yet even these exceptions involved the care
of sick or wounded soldiers rather than of the general population. With regard
to the establishment of institutions staffed by physicians who made diagnoses
and prescribed remedies, and where nursing provisions were also available, the
Church appears to have pioneered."

Woods and Lindberg are correct in pointing out that religion
played a major role in the establishment of hospitals. I will say, though, that
this is not unique to Christianity, as Buddhists played a prominent role in
establishing hospitals in India, China and elsewhere in Asia.

The Truth Must be Told

Your contribution supports independent journalism

Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.

Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.

Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.

Please contribute here.

or

Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding. Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here— it’s free and it’s essential NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America's survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

Follow Pamela Geller on Gettr. I am there. click here.

Follow Pamela Geller on
Trump's social media platform, Truth Social. It's open and free.

Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.

Join The Conversation. Leave a Comment.

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spammy or unhelpful, click the - symbol under the comment to let us know. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

If you would like to join the conversation, but don't have an account, you can sign up for one right here.

If you are having problems leaving a comment, it's likely because you are using an ad blocker, something that break ads, of course, but also breaks the comments section of our site. If you are using an ad blocker, and would like to share your thoughts, please disable your ad blocker. We look forward to seeing your comments below.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Sponsored
Geller Report
Thanks for sharing!