Search Results

The History of Personalized Medicine

Edward Abrahams and Mike Silver

in Integrative Neuroscience and Personalized Medicine

This chapter examines the historical path that has led to personalized medicine as we know it today, in the hope of gaining a better perspective on where it will take us in the not-too-distant ... More

This chapter examines the historical path that has led to personalized medicine as we know it today, in the hope of gaining a better perspective on where it will take us in the not-too-distant future. The foundations of anatomy, toxicology, histology, and cellular pathology were established in the centuries after Hippocrates, but it was not until the middle of the 20th century, when we began to get a deeper molecular understanding of disease, and then at the turn of the 21st century, with the sequencing of the human genome, that we could develop the tools to truly personalize diagnosis and treatment. This set in motion the transformation of personalized medicine from an intention to a practice.Less

Climate, fever, and medicine before 1700

Mark Harrison

in Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1660-1830

The first chapter of Part I begins by taking stock of European theories of fever, and of the importance of the work of the Hippocratic revival, particularly as reflected in the work of Sydenham, ... More

The first chapter of Part I begins by taking stock of European theories of fever, and of the importance of the work of the Hippocratic revival, particularly as reflected in the work of Sydenham, Boerhaave, and Hoffman. The discussion then turns to medical work in the tropical colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, placing British medicine in the context of earlier work by the Portuguese and Dutch. The chapter examines both the East and the West Indies. It shows the growing importance of climate and morbid anatomy in theories of disease and how ideas about disease had a bearing on concepts of race. The strongly natural‐historical orientation of colonial practice is emphasized, along with its connections to the politics of medical reform in Britain.Less

Hippocrates: The Brain as the Organ of Mind

Stanley Finger

in Minds Behind the Brain: A history of the pioneers and their discoveries

In order to understand the Hippocratic revolution in medicine and how it led to the perception of the brain as the ruling member of the body, we must think of ancient Greece at three different but ... More

In order to understand the Hippocratic revolution in medicine and how it led to the perception of the brain as the ruling member of the body, we must think of ancient Greece at three different but unequal points in time. These epochs can be designated Early Greece, the Golden Age of Greece, and the Hellenistic Era. Hippocrates lived from approximately 460 to 377 B.C., during the middle period or Golden Age of Greece. The three time periods are very different culturally. In each one, not only are there differences in government, religion, and the arts, but they also provide us with distinctly different views of the mind and the brain. This chapter also discusses the myths and legends surrounding the healing powers of Asklepios, son of Apollo and the nymph Coronis; medicine in Homer's epic poems Odyssey and Iliad; the Hippocratic Collection known as Corpus Hippocraticum, which had references to the brain and brain damage; and dissection, the nervous system, and the association between humor and disease.Less

Galen on the Seat of the Intellect: Anatomical Experiment and Philosophical Tradition

Teun Tieleman

in Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture

Galen's vivisection experiments concerned with the nervous system may rank among the most sophisticated known from ancient sources. Galen appears to inaugurate a new era in medicine, and anatomy in ... More

Galen's vivisection experiments concerned with the nervous system may rank among the most sophisticated known from ancient sources. Galen appears to inaugurate a new era in medicine, and anatomy in particular, by systematically working his way along the spinal chord and nerves, making incisions and carefully recording the resultant phenomena of paralysis. This chapter examines the nature and historical significance of Galen's experiments as reported in the first three books of On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. The main focus is on theoretical aspects, i.e. with the epistemological, or argumentative, status of the experiments as well as with their method. It is a fair assumption that Galen refined the method and technique of the experiments of his predecessors, particularly Herophilus and Erasistratus. His advocacy of the Platonic conception of the soul was destined to become immensely influential. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suppose that he carried the day.Less

Health in the Balance: Early Theories About Patterns of Disease Occurrence

Nancy Krieger

in Epidemiology and the People’s Health: Theory and Context

Curiosity about the causes and occurrence of disease is not unique to epidemiologists. After all, who wouldn’t be interested in knowing about how to live a healthy life?—or to predict and ward off ... More

Curiosity about the causes and occurrence of disease is not unique to epidemiologists. After all, who wouldn’t be interested in knowing about how to live a healthy life?—or to predict and ward off sickness, injury and death? As the historical record makes clear, people long have tried to account for disease occurrence: both individual cases and population patterns—and have done so steeped in the ideas of their times. Hence, as prelude to analyzing more familiar post-Renaissance epidemiologic theories, Chapter 2 considers four examples spanning from the ancient classical texts of Greek Hippocratic humoral theory and Chinese medicine to the current oral traditions of the Kallawaya in the Andes and the Ogori in Nigeria. Together, these examples reveal how diverse peoples in ancient and contemporary traditional societies have sought to explain their society's patterns of health and disease, as influenced by both their societal and ecologic context.Less

The Concept of Environment

Mervyn Susser and Zena Stein

in Eras in Epidemiology: The Evolution of Ideas

This chapter shows that a clear initial conception of the variables to be involved is critical to construct an effective epidemiological study. In the most general sense, this has been an essential ... More

This chapter shows that a clear initial conception of the variables to be involved is critical to construct an effective epidemiological study. In the most general sense, this has been an essential foundation of the major medical and public health advances contributed by epidemiology: each advance attained new clarity in the specification of variables constituting causal models, clarity that in turn depended on new concepts. These advances have followed as investigators specified, either formally or only by implication, the nature of the variables they first attempted to relate to each other and then to elucidate their causal links and time sequences. The chapter presents historical examples from early times to illustrate the process.Less

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water

Nicholas Mee

in Celestial Tapestry: The Warp and Weft of Art and Mathematics

The idea that matter is composed of four fundamental elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—dates back to the Greek philosopher Empedocles. This idea was enormously influential. It was adapted to ... More

The idea that matter is composed of four fundamental elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water—dates back to the Greek philosopher Empedocles. This idea was enormously influential. It was adapted to medicine by Hippocrates, who developed the theory of the four humours and the four temperaments. It also influenced the proto-science of alchemy. The eighth-century Islamic scholar known in Europe as Geber or Jabir believed that all metals are composed of mixtures of sulphur and mercury. Geber speculated that idealized philosophic sulphur and philosophic mercury were thought to be the chemical forms of two of the elements: Fire and Water.Less

Extremes and Perplexities of Appetite in Clinical Medicine

Elizabeth A. Williams

in Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950

Chapter 6 explores medical approaches to appetite from 1800 to 1850, the “golden age” of physiology. Many physicians were hostile to physiology in its experimental form, especially vitalists who ... More

Chapter 6 explores medical approaches to appetite from 1800 to 1850, the “golden age” of physiology. Many physicians were hostile to physiology in its experimental form, especially vitalists who argued that organic beings adhered to unique laws of vitality and that medicine alone could comprehend the physico-moral complexities of disturbed appetite. Representations of appetite and hunger in medical theses, textbooks, and journals often upheld Hippocrates as the premier authority and recounted tales of extreme under- and over-eaters including “fasting maids” and entertainers famed for grotesque eating. Seeking to refine Enlightenment era nosologies, physicians gave new attention to ills such as gastralgia and dyspepsia but did little to resolve conflicts over the primacy of psychic or bodily symptoms in different forms of those diseases. In emergent mental medicine, Philippe Pinel upheld the vitalist tenet that psychic illness was linked to ills of the epigastrium and stomach rather than the brain, but others insisted that mental illness was seated in the cerebro-nervous system, despite failures to locate responsible lesions in autopsy. Overall, appetite proved impervious to methods that represented medical progress, especially those of pathological anatomy, and conflicts continued over its nature and the causes of its disturbance.Less

Climactic Harmonies: Bodin

Robert Launay

in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder

Sixteenth century historians and jurists in France elaborated a position of legal relativism as a means of asserting independence from canons of Roman law and the domination of the Roman Catholic ... More

Sixteenth century historians and jurists in France elaborated a position of legal relativism as a means of asserting independence from canons of Roman law and the domination of the Roman Catholic Church. Drawing on the premise that different peoples required different laws and political institutions, Jean Bodin elaborated a comparative scheme, based on Hippocrates, and Aristotle’s theories of the effect of climate upon the body’s humors. Those who lived in hot, cold, and temperate climates had different dispositions, with denizens of temperate climates best suited to rule. Large parts of Europe were outside the temperate zone, which also included Turkey, Persia, and China. Cold climates were associated with the development of the body as opposed to the mind, as opposed to hot climates, including Morocco and Abyssinia, praised for their religiosity. Bodin also wrote a long dialogue between partisans of different religions, promoting an ideal of religious harmony rather than the exclusive domination of any single religion.Less

On the body and sexuality

Pierre Brulé and Antonia Nevill

in Women of Ancient Greece

If the quest for the rational defines Greek biology and medicine as ventures in the ‘scientification’ of knowledge, what we read remains most often ‘unscientific’. We see in operation less a ... More

If the quest for the rational defines Greek biology and medicine as ventures in the ‘scientification’ of knowledge, what we read remains most often ‘unscientific’. We see in operation less a reflection delving deeply into observations in vivo, with a gradual adaptation of thought to reality, than just one more product of the imagination; in this instance, the masculine working from an a priori conception of the feminine. Reading Hippocrates or Aristotle, we realise the extraordinary distance that separates them from the customary picture of Greece, homeland of reason and the devastating effects of their ideological interpretation of the body. In the classical era, commonsense, well represented by Xenophon in his Oeconomicus, contrasts men and women in their social functions, in absolute terms. This chapter discusses the female body and sexuality in ancient Greece, focusing on female physiology, reproduction, the embryo, the relative speeds of development of male and female, polysexuality, misogyny, feminisation and feminine ways of making love.Less

Weeping and Bad Hair: The Bodily Suffering of Early Christian Hell as a Threat to Masculinity

Meghan Henning

in Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity

This chapter draws upon the conceptions of gendered bodily suffering found in the ancient medical corpus (Hippocrates, Galen and inscriptions), martyrdom literature, and the Roman judicial rhetoric ... More

This chapter draws upon the conceptions of gendered bodily suffering found in the ancient medical corpus (Hippocrates, Galen and inscriptions), martyrdom literature, and the Roman judicial rhetoric of punitive suffering to read apocalyptic depictions of bodily suffering as “effeminizing” punishments, which in turn utilized masculinity and bodily normativity to police behavior, and equated early Christian ethical norms with masculinity and bodily “health.” By highlighting the different types of bodies found in these texts, as well as the ways in which Christian norms interacted with Greek and Roman notions of the body, the chapter shows how masculinity and ancient notions of bodily normativity worked in concert to mark sin in early Christian hell, in turn creating an ancient Christian culture of bodily normativity. These early Christian texts expanded the existing frameworks of bodily suffering as a disciplinary performance and focused on the non-normative body as a punitive spectacle and pedagogical object.Less

The Body of Western Embodiment: Classical Antiquity and the Early History of a Problem

Brooke Holmes

in Embodiment: A History

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category ... More

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category of the body itself as historically emergent. Bruno Snell argued that Homer lacked a concept of the body (sōma), but it is the emergence of body in the fifth century BCE rather than the appearance of mind or soul that is most consequential for the shape of ancient dualisms. The body takes shape in Hippocratic medical writing as largely hidden and unconscious interior space governed by impersonal forces. But Plato’s corpus demonstrates that while Plato’s reputation as a somatophobe is well grounded and may arise in part from the way the body takes shape in medical and other physiological writing, the Dialogues represent a more complex position on the relationship between body and soul than Plato’s reputation suggests.Less

Historic Decentering of the Modern Discourse of Climate Change: The Long View from the Vedic Sagesto Montesquieu

Michael R. Dove

in Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change

This chapter places contemporary climate change discourse within a context of millennia of human experience with and thinking about the climate. Dove examines five canonical historic texts–works by ... More

This chapter places contemporary climate change discourse within a context of millennia of human experience with and thinking about the climate. Dove examines five canonical historic texts–works by Hippocrates, Theophrastus, Montesquieu, and Ibn Khaldûn, and an exploration of older Vedic teachings by Zimmermann. He traces common concerns through these texts: interest in the epistemology of climate knowledge; a focus on human difference versus similarity; an emphasis on the impact of nature on culture, as opposed to the reverse; the pedagogy of peopled versus unpeopled landscapes; and the removal of climate problems from ourselves. These historic studies seem both familiar and foreign to us today; and reading them helps to decenter, and thereby illuminate, contemporary thinking about climate and society.Less

Information and Empirical Sensibility

Richard Yeo

in Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

This chapter argues that thinking about notes clarified some of the challenges and opportunities of the ‘new philosophy,’ or empirical science, in early modern Europe. Francis Bacon called for the ... More

This chapter argues that thinking about notes clarified some of the challenges and opportunities of the ‘new philosophy,’ or empirical science, in early modern Europe. Francis Bacon called for the making of natural histories?that is, huge collections of empirical information on topics ranging from celestial phenomena to technology, thus yielding histories of the air, of heat and cold, of sounds, blood, of life and death. This programme, embraced by Fellows of the Royal Society, required methodical and collaborative note-taking. Robert Boyle presented the modern virtuoso as one who eschewed premature systems and sought detailed information from a wide range of sources. As Secretary, Henry Oldenburg facilitated this programme and communicated about protocols for note-taking and information-sharing. In defending the long-term character of empirical inquiry, the virtuosi found sustenance in Hippocrates's first aphorism about life being short and art (or science) long.Less

Medicine as a Calling

in Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts

This chapter describes the development of Herman Boerhaave's basic approach to medicine and chemistry by reviewing his education as a student at the University of Leiden and then his early program ... More

This chapter describes the development of Herman Boerhaave's basic approach to medicine and chemistry by reviewing his education as a student at the University of Leiden and then his early program for curriculum reform as a lecturer on the Leiden medical faculty. Within the University of Leiden community, Boerhaave's reputation as both a model Calvinist and a Hippocratic physician had a rhetorical role during his medical career. In his “Commentariolus,” he suggested that he was largely self-taught in theology and medicine, and successfully utilized his appointment as lecturer as a gateway for an appointment to a chair on the medical faculty. Boerhaave's strong advocacy of Hippocrates was a means of validating certain modern medical practices. In general, his success as a medical lecturer at Leiden relied on his ability to attain the support of the curators and the students at the university.Less

Complexio/Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures, 1250–1600

Valentin Groebner

in The Moral Authority of Nature

This chapter explores the background and the uses of some Renaissance notions of the nature of individuals and the boundaries they were placed within, with particular attention to the frameworks of ... More

This chapter explores the background and the uses of some Renaissance notions of the nature of individuals and the boundaries they were placed within, with particular attention to the frameworks of visualization that surrounded and shaped these notions. By what outward signs could the “nature” of an individual be recognized, and by what categories were these signs linked to a person's body and its physical qualities, embodied or incorporated in the literal sense? For this, the chapter focuses on the notion Hippocrates uses and describes its journey from the medieval centers of Scholastic learning in Italy and Paris to the sixteenth-century printing presses north of the Alps. Derived from learned Renaissance discourse, it has, to our days, a certain prominence in administrative protocols of a person's outward appearance, a piece of history of science in the identity documents.Less

From Hippocrates to Shakespeare and Dickens: epilepsy's entry into ‘the circuit of culture’

in Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter

This chapter describes the cultural narratives of epilepsy in the mid-twentieth century. It considers the medical-cultural languages of epilepsy from Hippocrates through to William Shakespeare, ... More

This chapter describes the cultural narratives of epilepsy in the mid-twentieth century. It considers the medical-cultural languages of epilepsy from Hippocrates through to William Shakespeare, William Gowers, and Charles Dickens. It also reviews the textual play between different narrative genres. This chapter suggests an archaeology of those signifying systems and narrative relationships that have come together over time to inscribe epilepsy with meaning within western medical-cultural systems. It argues that ‘the epileptics’ produced through the genealogies presented are not the same epileptics.Less

Anti-Inflammatory Drugs

Jie Jack Li

in Laughing Gas, Viagra, and Lipitor: The Human Stories Behind the Drugs We Use

Inflammation and immunity, like all other normal reactions of the body, are meant to preserve or restore health. They can nonetheless cause a range of uncomfortable symptoms. Inflammation is such a ... More

Inflammation and immunity, like all other normal reactions of the body, are meant to preserve or restore health. They can nonetheless cause a range of uncomfortable symptoms. Inflammation is such a complicated process that one would have a hard time reaching a consensus on its definition. Historically, inflammation was one of the earliest recognized and defined diseases. Two thousand years ago, Roman physician and encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus (25 B.C.–50 A.D., not to be confused with Celsius, the unit for temperature) described the four cardinal signs of inflammation: calor (warmth), dolor (pain), tumor (swelling), and rubor (redness). The fifth element of inflammation, functio laesi (loss of function or movement), was noted later. Classic inflammatory diseases include rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. However, evidence is mounting that inflammation is implicated in many diseases that are not normally considered inflammatory. For instance, when arterial plaques become inflamed they can burst open, prompting a myriad of heart diseases. Inflammatory bowel conditions greatly increase the risk of colon tumors. Even diabetes has been associated with a number of inflammatory compounds. It was hard to define what inflammation was, but finding a remedy was even more challenging. Aspirin, available in 1880, represented possibly the first really effective treatment for inflammation, whereas cortisone and other corticosteroids were not available for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis until the early 1950s. Louis Pasteur stated, “Dans les champs de l’observation, le hazard ne favorise que les esprit préparés” [In the field of experimentation, chance favors the prepared mind]. Like numerous cases in drug discovery, Philip S. Hench’s discovery of cortisone for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis illustrates Pasteur’s point. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disease characterized by pain, swelling, and subsequent destruction of joints. Until the late 1940s, there was no viable treatment, and, understandably, pessimism prevailed in medical society about its prognosis. Even William Osler, one of the greatest physicians, said “When an arthritic patient walks in the front door, I want to run out the back door!” The situation did not change much until Hench discovered a “miracle drug” in 1949. Less