Folk medicine comprises knowledge systems that
developed over generations within various societies
before the era of modern medicine. The World Health
Organisation (WHO) defines traditional medicine as 'the
sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based
on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to
different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in
the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention,
diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and
mental illness'.
Limits to primitive medicine
There are some very distinct limits to primitive medicine
and therefore to its usefulness. There is, for instance, no
distinction between medical efficacy and subjective belief.
Such medicine is not a distinct discipline, but controlled
'Progress has not
followed a straight
ascending line,
but a spiral with
rhythms of progress
and retrogression,
of evolution and
dissolution.'
by priests or a shaman caste and pathology is deemed
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
non-physical. All primitive medicine was regional and
(1749-1832)
tribal based.
Empirical Medicine
ODYSSEY 44
•
DIGIMAG
The second stage of medical evolution began around
connected to bodily organs and functions. Concepts of the
2 000 years ago. In China Zhang Zhongjing wrote the
body and of disease used in TCM have notions similar to
Shanghan Lun or Treatise on Cold Diseases, in which
disease was rationally laid out in regard to (believed)
cause. Zhang Zhongjing was a Han Dynasty physician
and one of the most eminent Chinese physicians during
the later years of that dynasty. He established medication
principles and summerised the medicinal experience up
until that time, thus making a great contribution to the
development of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
In the West, Hippocrates laid the foundation of
Greek Medicine, while Claudius Galenus, also called
Galen, further developed its theory and practice, and
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