The Musings of an Urban Christian

  Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery," by Ira Rutkow. What is significant is the Hippocratic-based conviction that health and illness can be explained through an understanding of nature, apart from the shackles of religion and speculation. Pre-Hippocratic Greek healers regarded disease as being of supernatural origin, caused by angry gods or demonic possession. The underlying concepts in the Corpus opposed these beliefs. There is not a single mention of evil spirits in the entirety of the writings. Instead, what the Corpus offered was a biologic-based approach to disease.  The followers of Hippocratic-style medicine believed that ill health was not a punishment brought by angry gods but the consequence of lifestyle choices, environmental issues, and other mitigating factors including mind-set and social class. They called for an analytic approach to healing, one independent of dogmatism and hearsay and, instead,