Anesthesia and Medicinal Herbs

Most of our lectures this week dealt with parts of the medicine in the past that turned out to be incorrect thinking by these ancient scientists or just lucky assumptions based on almost no cold, hard fact. I begin to see that so much of science and medicine deals with the guys (or girls) that are willing to take the risk for the hope of the greater benefit upon humans. One would hope that the motives behind all earth-shaking discoveries would be for the better of mankind, but this is simply not so. Like Dr. Wasser said, so many of these scientists, who were made famous for their discoveries, may have not been the first. Rather, their instinct and ambition to make themselves known allowed them to put their own name out there before someone else could. I did not get this feeling from the history lessons we received from Horst Stoeckel, but Paracelsus definitely seems like the type, with his two hats, to have wanted to merely get his name in bold letters in the science community or history books. This worked in a sense for Paracelsus, despite his seemingly boastful attitude, which is such the attitude of so many intellectuals. Pride is a pattern and humility is a rarity in the intellectually elite despite the fact that so many of them could never have reached such great heights without the build-up provided by others. It’s always nice to meet and interact with a man such as Horst Stoeckel who, despite having achieved such success in life, still finds joy not only in his own achievements but also in the achievements of others and the progress of his field of study.

Seeing the progression of medicine to what we have, now, there is no doubt in my mind that there are thousands upon thousands of remedies to be discovered, yet. History has proven in itself that one of man’s flaws is accepting for fact what should be questioned and tested. Of course, that doesn’t mean that one should not take chances on what is not completely proven right, because it is much easier to prove something wrong than it is to prove something right. Even our ‘knowledge’ of what man was like before written history has drastically changed recently because new information is being presented so often from geological findings. Then even with historical civilizations, information is limited to words described by the few scribes’ and historians’ writings that have survived the centuries.

In what is deemed as medical history, societies have chosen different parts of the body to glorify as the vital organ of the body based on what little knowledge they previously had. This statement assumes that we know so much about the bodies we currently live in, which is debatable from lack of eradication of disease and death. Nonetheless, I think it safe to say we now know a bit more about the organs of the human (and animal) body compared to a mere hundred years ago. The exponential rise in technology has brought about an exponential rise in ability in the field of medicine within just the last twenty-five years, alone. Thinking the blood to be the source of life, Mesopotamians deemed the liver the primary organ; French and ancient Egyptian societies also glorified the liver for different reasons. Odd reasons come from odd means of healing coming from these ancient Babylonian people. Healing was attempted in these times by people like seers using divination, priests or shamans, and butchers called physicians or surgeons. Skills of all three types were rudimentary at best even up until the 19^th century.

Men such as Galen of Pergamum may have had respectively extensive knowledge of the human skeletal system and external features, but regulations of the time on research of dead (or alive for that matter) human bodies brought progression of medicine to a plateau. Research on the bodies of mammals with similar features to that of humans can only go so far, because it should be obvious that different external features and abilities points to having different internal features and abilities. Theories such as those made about the heart by Galen came close to but never quite reached facts that we now know to be true. Lack of research of the human internal anatomy resulted in false assumptions based off of anatomy of other mammals. Leonardo Da Vinci may have opened a few doors with his doubtless illegal study of human internal anatomy. His drawings of our organs were some of the most accurate of his time.