An ancient Greek joke. A physician with only one eye asks a patient about his condition. The patient answers : As you see! The physician replies: Then half of you is dead. Philogelos

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis,One if not the longest word to appear in standard English dictionaries for a disease caused by ultra-microscopic particles of sandy volcanic dust (or is it better to call it Pneumonohypermicroscopicopsammohephaestiokoniosis?)

Ancient Greek medicine played an important role for almost 1500 years. Galen was probably the most important Physician of all time and his collected work includes around 20000 pages of text. Only with Vesalius and others around 1600 AD the knowledge again was improved.

Nobody knew what was the illness of the young Prince Antiochus until the famous Greek physician Erasistratus observed the typical symptoms of Sappho

Greek medicine is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Greek mind, it reaches from a time somewhat before Hippocrates down to the time of Galen and Celsus, it ranges from prophylactic medicine and dietary medicine to surgery, it includes a great deal of valid anatomical research as well as a fully developed herbal pharmacopoeia. Since the beginning of the l9 century, Greek medicine has ceased to be the reigning medical art of our world, we have gone further than our fathers and grandfathers would have thought possible, and we are on the edge of still greater forward strides. In view of our accelerating medical acceleration, it is important to trace the discipline back to its origins, not only in order to document the early history of medical science, but in order to isolate the germs of imaginative thought which guided the Greeks on the road to the medical art. Some of these elements of medical thought are to be found centuries before Hippocrates, buried in the myths of the early Greeks, and some evidence of millennia of experimentation with herbal materials can be found in the early mythological tradition as well as in the later manual of Dioscorides. What medical matters we find in the myths may be primitive, but they are the first stumbling steps of thinking men trying to find the road to medical understanding, and as such they are to be observed carefully, and they are to be respected.

William Harris, Prof. Em. Middlebury College

Timeline Greek medicine

Medicine and Mythology

Asclepios was also entrusted to Chiron the centaur for a time, and learned medicine from him. The centaur baby-sitter and pedagogue appears in many myths, for reasons which are not by any means clear. ESP communications have been posited between animals and sensitive humans, especially the very young, and this may be a part of the picture, of which we have only a part. If the horse had an aversion to plants which are poisonous to men, or showed men where sources of salt, a rare material and a necessity to all mammals, existed, stories about the horse's medical knowledge might arise; William Harris, Domestication of Animals. Greek Myth

Στα 'Ιχνη του Ασκληπιού (From Asclepius to Galen in Greek) , Medicine and Pharmacopoeia

Physicians, Instruments

a) Hippocrates , b) Herophilos and Erasistratus , c) Galen , d) Dioscorides of Anazarbus and Pharmacology

Examples of ancient Greeks medical knowledge

Anatomical studies in Alexandria: Experiments with criminals , Ancient Greek and Roman Medical Instruments

The Plague of Athens (Thucydides)

Greek Medical History on Stamps

GERMAN Reports

Asklepios Medal, Asklepios Prize since 1984, University of Saarland /Germany, with Asklepios and Artemis (derived from a coin from Pergamon)

Vom Ansehen des Arztes in der Antike

Psychology

The only difference between the immortal Greece and contemporary times is Sigmund Freud, who discovered that the human body, purely platonic at the Greece epoch, nowadays is full of secret drawers that only the psychoanalysis is capable to open. Salvador Dali

Bathysiderodromophobia. The fear of subways and other things underground.

I was impressed reading that Artemidorus performed some kind of statistical analysis by interviewing a large number of persons about their dreams in order to develop a theory published in his Oneirocritica. I looked what Artemidorus had to say about my dreams. Often I dream that I can fly. Did the ancient Greeks also have similar dreams? And what can I learn from Artemidorus and others? I will later include more information about the work of ancient Greeks concerning Psychology which did not start with the work of Sigmund Freud. Why so few know the pioneering work of Artemidorus? In a report about Freud it was mentioned that one of his famous books was sold only around 600 times in 10 years. If one considers how many copies of less important books are sold one understands that quality is not defined by quantity only.