Hippocratic Medicine as a Departure from its Egyptian and Mesopotamian Essay

Hippocratic Medicine as a Departure from its Egyptian and Mesopotamian Forerunners - Essay Example The paper â€Å"Hippocratic Medicine as a Departure from its Egyptian and Mesopotamian Forerunners† proposes that there are significant ways in which Hippocratic medicine was a radical departure from the faith-based healing in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Greek medicine was considered the foundation of medicine in the Western world. This view began to change as the Western world began gained a broader knowledge of the history of medicine, resulting to a correlation being established between the earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian medicine and that of Ancient Greece. It is important to review this relationship to see whether the decline in the reputation of Greek medicine is justified. It is proposed to examine whether Greek medicine was in fact a radical departure from the healing based on religious beliefs that was practiced in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. This paper claims that Hippocratic medicine was in fact such a radical departure because of its use of surgical procedu res, its concept of practitioner responsibility, and its basis in naturalism. Naturalism is the idea that events are explained only on the basis of causes that exist in nature. For instance, a practitioner may attribute a patient’s sickness to a change in the weather or to a lack of exercise, an imbalance in diet, or an incorrect position of the body during treatment. Naturalism tends to determine the causes of a disease based on what can be seen and examined in the natural world rather than on supernatural forces that occur in the spiritual realm.