The Invention of Medicine by Robin Lane Fox

I'm only 1/4 of the way through this book, but there are some thoughts that I have to log before I forget them...

As with so many aspects of culture in Classical Greece, something fundamentally changed with medicine, starting somewhere in the late 6th century BC and continuing through the 5th.

To generalize, doctors in that time and place stopped thinking about the gods as the primary source of illness.  They started thinking about illness as processes, each with a predictable beginning, middle and end.  And they started documenting their experiences in prose, the "Hippocratic Corpus"; whereas Homer wrote about illness and injury, he wrote in poetic form about how the gods controlled such things, with unpredictable outcomes that varied with their whims.

The doctors' actual understanding of medicine did not necessarily take great leaps forward during this time period.  But the way they approached medicine did change fundamentally, creating the opportunity for consistent improvement over time in subsequent centuries.

But as with so much of the change that occurred during this time and place, I keep asking myself why?  Why did medicine change so dramatically?  Why did politics, law, literature, drama and so many other things do the same?

That is the central question that I want to understand.  Why Greece?  Why in the Classical period?

Perhaps the question is unanswerable.  Perhaps I can chip away at it and develop some hypotheses.

Anyhow, this time and place fascinates me.  Yes, what happened is altogether fascinating.  But how can I get to the bottom of why?