A Brief History of Disease, Science and Medicine:
From the ice age to the genome project
By Michael Kennedy MD FACS
“‘Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.’ (Macaulay, History of England, v. 1, ch. 1, 1848.)”
“The invention of agriculture marks the transition to the Neolithic, or ‘new stone age,’ period. With it came the development of larger social groups and the advent of infectious disease.”
“Prior to agriculture, with few carbohydrates in the diet, the incidence of caries (cavities) was about one percent in skeletal remains (and none are found in the Iceman). In the Neolithic period, with a diet including cereals and other carbohydrates, this incidence rose about five fold, still far below the incidence after the introduction of sucrose in the seventeenth century.”
“Ancient cities were so unhealthy that, until the nineteenth century, the mortality rate of the city-dwellers exceeded their birth rate and the population was only maintained by an influx of rural immigrants. Rome was an exception because of the high quality of sanitary facilities but other factors intervened…”
“Imhotep, an Egyptian physician in the archaic period and vizier to Pharaoh Zozer about 2600BCE, became a revered and, finally, god-like figure in later dynasties, establishing a following somewhat like that of Asclepius in Greek medicine. By the sixth century BCE he had replaced Thoth as god of healing.”
(to be continued…)
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