Classical Medicine

Abstract

The medicine of the classical physician was based on a integral understanding of the universe, society, and the human body. The long eleventh century marked an important transition in medical care. In certain reigns, the imperial government, responding to a series of epidemics and other needs, deeply involved itself in medicine. It collected ancient classics, edited, and printed them, to furnish a corpus on which education could be uniformly based. It founded a medical school to prepare the sons of elite families for therapeutic careers. It opened pharmacies to minimize inflation in the prices of drugs. It attempted to sponsor medical education and medical care in the provinces. The political infighting of the time limited the success of these initiatives. Classical therapy saw health as a dynamic balance of metabolic and circulatory processes adjusted to the body’s physical environment, and disease as the result of either inner imbalance or invasion by pathogens. The eleventh century was the first time in a millennium that doctors and other scholars were able to synthesize disparate earlier approaches to diagnosis and therapy. They enriched these methods with others adapted from popular, Buddhist, and Daoist health care. This chapter explains basic concepts and their application, and provides some examples of doctor-patient relationships and of the applications of doctrine in medical care.