MEDICINE AND ORIGINS ..

 Medicine is the science devoted to studying the life, health, illness and death of human beings, and involves the art of technical knowledge to perform such maintenance and restoration of health, applied to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention diseases. The medicine is part of the so-called health sciences.

The medicine had its beginnings in prehistoric times, which also has its own field of study known as "medical anthropology" were used plants, minerals and animal parts in most of the time these substances were used in magic rituals by shamans , priests, wizards, witches, animists, spiritualists and diviners.

Old data found show the medicine in different cultures as Ayurvedic medicine of India, ancient Egypt, ancient China and Greece. One of the earliest known historical characters is Hippocrates who is also known as the father of medicine, Aristotle supposed descendant of Asclepius, for his family: Asclepiades, and Galen. Following the fall of Rome in Western Europe fell Greek medical tradition.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

After 750 A.D. Muslims translated the works of Galen and Aristotle into Arabic by which the Islamic physicians were induced in medical research. It is worth mentioning some important Islamic figures as Avicenna who together with Hippocrates has also been mentioned as the father of medicine, Abulcasis the father of surgery, Avenzoar the father of experimental surgery, Ibn al-Nafis father of circulatory physiology, Averroes and Rhazes called father of pediatrics. By the late Middle Ages after the Black Death, major medical figures emerged in Europe as William Harvey and Grabiele Fallopio.

In the past most of the medical thinking was due to what other authorities had previously said and looked as if it was said that that remained the truth. This thinking was largely replaced between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD, a time of pandemic "Black Death".

Pre-modern biomedical research various methods discredited old as the "four humors" of Greek origin, is in the nineteenth century, with advances in microscope Leeuwenhoek discoveries of Robert Koch of bacterial transmission, when you actually saw the beginning of modern medicine.

Only in the eighteenth century saw large quantities of discoveries such as antibiotics that was a great moment for medicine, characters such as Rudolf Virchow, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Alexander Fleming, Karl Landsteiner, Otto Loewi, Joseph Lister, Francis Crick , Florence Nightingale, Maurice Wilkins, Howard Florey, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, William Williams Keen, William Coley, James D. Watson, Salvador Luria, Alexandre Yersin, Kitasato Shibasaburo, Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard, Paul Broca, Nikolai Korotkov, William Osler and Harvey Cushing as the most important among others.

As medicine and technology is developed, it began to become more reliable, as the emergence of the pharmacology of herbal drugs to date are derived from various plants such as atropine, warfarin, aspirin, digoxin, taxol etc..; Of all was first discovered by Paul Ehrlich discovered arsphenamine in 1908 after observing that the bacteria died while human cells did not.

The earliest forms of sulfa drugs were antibiotics. Currently, antibiotics have become very sophisticated. Modern antibiotics can attack specific physiological locations, some even designed to support the body to reduce side effects.

Vaccines in turn were discovered by Dr. Edward Jenner saw that milkmaids who contracted cow vaccinia virus from contact with the pustules were immune to smallpox, which is the start of vaccination. Years later, Louis Pasteur gave him the name of vaccine after the work of Edward Jenner in cows.

Currently, knowledge about the human genome has begun to have a great influence on her, why have identified several conditions linked to a specific gene in which the Cell Biology and Genetics Management focus in medical practice still, these methods are still in their infancy.

 The staff of Asclepius

 

This staff is used as the worldwide symbol of medicine. This is a staff with a coiled snake, representing the Greek god Asclepius. This symbol is used by organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), the American Medical Association and osteopathy, the Australian and British Medical and various medical schools around the world that also incorporate this logo.