ABSTRACT
The recorded history of Western medicine begins with Greek physicians who created a system of understanding disease as an imbalance in natural substances: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The corresponding descriptive terms now applied to personalities, sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, and melancholic attest to the durability of this and many other Greek medical constructs and philosophies. One of the major problems of understanding ancient medicine, trying to understand the disease at issue, is not a problem when studying the history of wound care, at least with regard to acute wounds. Wounds inflicted with sharp and blunt instruments, burns, bites, and other such injuries are presumably the same throughout history. With regard to making wounds to treat wounds, Indian medicine, which introduced skin grafting and skin flaps especially to repair noses which were cut off as punishment, was far ahead of western medicine.
