Humorism ruled until the microscope’s century
Medical history studies healing practices across societies, drawing on economics, sociology, and politics for context. Early traditions rose in Babylon, Egypt, China, and India. Renaissance optics birthed the microscope; before the nineteenth century, humorism explained disease until newer theories displaced it.
Prehistoric healthcare stretches from stone tools about 3.3 million years ago to writing about five thousand years ago—plant lore and healing without modern categories.
Scattered populations mean staggered archaeological clocks for technology and literacy, so one global timeline misleads.
With no written records, prehistoric healing is reconstructed from illness visible in skeletons, plant fossils and excavations, with anthropology helping to read how bodily and spiritual cures overlapped. The standout case is Ötzi the Iceman, from around 3230 BC: archaeologist Patrick Hunt argues he carried a deliberate medical kit for his many ailments, including birch polypore fungus. In Mesopotamia the Sumerians, among the first to write in the third millennium BCE, recorded drug prescriptions, operations and exorcisms on clay tablets, carried out by clearly defined specialists. The later Babylonian Diagnostic Handbook paired lists of symptoms with logical rules linking what a physician observed to a diagnosis and prognosis. Most surviving tablets come from the neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian eras, roughly 900 to 500 BCE, and they show preventive measures, attempts to stop disease spreading, descriptions of stroke and awareness of mental illness.
Egyptian medicine survives mostly on papyrus. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, dated to 1800 BCE and describing 34 cases of women's complaints including trouble conceiving, is the oldest surviving medical text of any kind. Material in the Edwin Smith Papyrus may reach back to 3000 BCE and is sometimes credited to Imhotep, and the Ebers Papyrus holds the earliest known mention of enemas. Institutions called Houses of Life existed by 2200 BCE. Hesy-Ra, chief of dentists and physicians to King Djoser in the 27th century BCE, is the earliest physician known by name, and Peseshet, overseer of women physicians in the 4th dynasty, the earliest known woman doctor. Herodotus judged Egyptians the healthiest people after the Libyans and claimed each physician treated just one disease.
Source: History of medicine
