The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (The Norton History of Science)

Whereas Plato distrusted sense experience, his pupil launched a programme of empirical investigation into the natural world – into zoology, botany and meteorology.

Athenian sculpture and painting revered the human form, proudly displaying its naked magnificence and finding in its geometrical forms echoes of the fundamental harmonies of nature, tradition was thus begun that would climax in the Renaissance image of ‘Vitruvian Man’, the representation of the naked male figure inscribed at the centre of the cosmo

(1738–1814), whose praise of its humanity (it was fast and foolproof) illustrates the Revolution’s chilling blend of idealism and inhumanity.

Medicine has offered the promise of ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’, but not always on terms palatable to and compatible with cherished ideals.

‘If a physician has performed a major operation on a lord with a bronze lancet and has saved the lord’s life . . . he shall receive ten shekels of silver’ (more than a craftsman’s annual pay); but if he caused the death of such a notable, his hand would be chopped off.

Broken bones were treated with fat from the ñandú, an ostrich-like bird, and llama kidney juice was dropped into aching ears.

The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the darkness.

Thus to many, from classical poets up to the prophets of modernity, disease has seemed the dark side of development, its Jekyll-and-Hyde double: progress brings pestilences, society sickness.

This separation of medicine from religion points to another distinctive feature of Greek healing: its openness, a quality characteristic of Greek intellectual activity at large, which it owed to political diversity and cultural pluralism.