Hippocrates and galen are two of the two protodoctors I'm aware of. Galen invent a treatment for hysteria which eventually became the first vibrator. Hippocrates thought seizures could be used to treat mental illness...think it was malaria seizures or something (there was a lot of malaria around at the time...and then they cleared up the malaria problem in rome but doctors kept giving mentally ill people seizures even to this day). Spring waters were used to treat mania and it is thought it is because of the lithium content but the dose of lithium would have been tiny compared to the doses of lithium used by modern medicine.
But were these protodoctors the ones who medicaliised the human condition inappropriately and so now were left will an ill society and world. It wasn't kraeplin and his ilk who made the mistake which caused society's illness. It was the romans.
But perhaps it wasn't. Unfortuneatly my knowledge of history before the greeks and the romans ain't great.
Perhaps it was the sumerians who created mental illness. Think they're responsible for a lot of stuff. They made the earliest replicatable language device, by which I mean the earliest thing that was like what the printing press technology did. This is one of the most important technologies in science. Without at least basic standardised communication technology or language then there would be no science nor engineering nor anything else.
Perhaps I should learn more about the sumerians.
No comments:
Post a Comment