Paragraph on “The History of Medicine” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

The History of Medicine

The Human body has always been prone to ailments and man has always tried to find new ways of curing sicknesses. Some of the initial methods of treatment were illogical but then they aroused man’s curiosity to know more about the human body thus leading to the development of modern medicine. Initially disease was looked upon with superstition and cure was, carried out by priests and magicians. The  earliest form of treatment known to man was called ‘Trepanning’, in which a hole was cut in the patient’s skull so as to allow the evil , spirits in the patient’s brain to come out and cure him of his ailment. In ancient Greece people went to temples when they were ill, to make sacrifices to the gods and drank medicated water. In the year 400 B.C. a Greek doctor called Hippocrates, the father of medicine, declared that nature caused disease  and it alone could cure it. Later the Greek physician Galen compounded the idea that the body contained four fluids i.e. blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile and called these the four ‘humours’, he said that an imbalance of these fluids caused disease and ailment. With the advent of the Renaissance, knowledge grew and experiments began to form the basis of medicine. In early 15th century, a scientist called Vesalius began to study human dead bodies to understand the anatomy. In 1628 an English doctor called William Harvey discovered blood circulation and he was able to explain the system of arteries and veins in the body. Knowledge of the anatomy helped in the development of surgery, but deaths due to deadly infections after an operation were high, in the year 1865 Joseph Lister an English surgeon developed an antiseptic spray called carbolic acid which destroyed bacteria in the operating room thus reducing the number of deaths. Other breakthroughs continued over the years and are still continuing in man’s quest to know and cure.