5 Things the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us

The ancient Greeks are widely seen as having been the founders of Western medicine more than 2,000 years ago. But since then our understanding of the human body and how to treat it has changed beyond recognition. So what would be the point of studying ancient Greek medicine today?

It’s part of a more general question: why bother studying medicine from times before people knew about germs, antibiotics, the circulation of the blood, or anesthetics? Although we now have a far more detailed and accurate picture of medicine, I think the ancient Greeks can help us think through a number of topics that are still relevant today.

1. New (old) treatments

Perhaps I’m biased on this point: my pregnant mother turned down the offer of a prescription of thalidomide, a drug that used to be prescribed for morning sickness but was eventually discovered to severely damage unborn children. Medicine gets it wrong. We’d be naive to think that everything we do now is right.

The ancient Greeks thought they had the answers. So do we. Looking at a medical system so different from our own, but one which lasted for many centuries teaches us that we should never accept anything without challenging it and without being prepared to rethink if new evidence comes along.

But the Greeks also teach us that medicine needs to make sense to its audience. It was not like our quest for “a pill for every ill”, the same treatment for a disease regardless of the patient. It was holistic, preventative, and tailored to the individual. Similarly, in the wake of modern genetic studies, customising medicine to each person has become a focus of medicine once more. We can learn a lot from the ancient Greeks.

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