6).
In ancient Mesopotamia -- according to the Indiana University (IU) -- there were two kinds of medical practitioners; the "ashipu" was also called a "sorcerer" and one of his jobs was to give a diagnosis of the medical problem. He was also accountable to determine "which god or demon was causing the illness" (IU), and to figure out if the illness resulted from "some error or sin on the part of the patient." The curing of the patient also fell into the hands of the ashipu; he used charms and spells designed to push the spirit out of the body that had caused the problem in the first place (IU). When the situation called for it, the ashipu referred his patient to the other kind of medical practitioner, the asu, a specialist in herbal remedies who also knew how to treat wounds. The asu used three "fundamental techniques: washing, bandaging, and making plasters"; the plasters were prepared by heating plant resin or animal fat with alkali (IU).
The world's first physician? According to a book by Michael Woods and Mary Boyle Woods, before there were doctors, ancient people treated themselves and their families -- or they "relied on magician or healers with no formal medical training" (Woods, et al., 2000, p. 24). A healer might typically be a farmer or shepherd tending flocks, and medicine would be just a part-time job, the author continues. But the first physician in the world, reportedly, came along near Cairo in 2650 BC, a man by the name of Imhotep, Woods explains. Dr. William Osler (who died in 1919), a Canadian doctor, wrote that Imhotep was: "…the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity" (Woods, p. 24). Imhotep was a chancellor (main assistant) to the pharaoh Zoser, and was better known as an engineer and...
Birth Control Practices in the Ancient World Annotated Bib Bujalkova, M. "Birth Control in Antiquity." Bratisl Lek Listy. (108:3), 2007. 163-66. The research conducted by ancient medical scholars led to some of the most extensive of early medical inquiries. Bujalkova explores what he feels is a fairly serious problem in examining ancient texts and the forms of birth control and contraception that they employed. This problem is that many of the
The nation-state that grew around the trade zones, like ancient Egypt, served to establish boundaries between trade zones, trading populations, and defined their zones by the locations of trading goods (16). A for the territory of a city-state. Early Etruria (fig. 5) offers another instance of an arguably "pristine" civilization, which emerged into history as a hegemony of 12 city-states. The mean distance between neighbors (with common terrestrial boundaries) is
This was true for example in the northern countries of Europe where Protestantism had firmly embedded itself an thrown off Church teaching. Wars were the result as the Holy Roman Empire attempted to put down the Protestant Rebellions -- but the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 finally and politically gave the Protestant countries in the north of Europe the right to exercise their new religions. Humanism, indeed, was spreading
They also helped create the notion of irrigation and water management, as they built aqueducts and ditches to carry water to farmers far removed from the Nile River. Their technologies helped develop the idea of moving water to where it was needed, something in use today with the massive aqueducts in California that carry water from Northern California and the Colorado River to Southern California's major cities. The Egyptians were
Ancient Greeks It is generally well-known around the world -- at least in Western society -- that the ancient Greeks are noted for having launched the system of democracy. At the very lease the ancient Greeks started a kind of democratic system that later was more fully developed. There were other contributions by the ancient Greeks, and they will be presented in this paper. Democracy An article in the website for the
Chinese Inventions The ancient Chinese were an innovative people who were able to independently develop the ideas for many of the things we take for granted today. Even though these ideas originated in the East they have proven valuable throughout the world, disseminated by such explorers as Marco Polo and others who realized the importance of the things they had seen. Francis Bacon viewed many of these Chinese inventions as crucial
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