ABSTRACT
The history of medicine is a story of humans trying to better understand and treat the various diseases and injuries that befell themselves and their companions. From simply providing comfort and empathy, medical care evolved with ever more effective means of diagnosing and treating illnesses. Pharmacology was likely the rst tool to be developed, thousands of years ago, as shaman or medicine women or simply mothers caring for infants found that certain plants had benecial properties (for example, Figure 1.1). In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel describes how a Neanderthal medicine woman treated the wounds of a small Cro-Magnon child:
Even though Iza did not understand the true nature of infection, she recognized that there were tools she could use to ward them off. Though many later developments in medicine were fraudulent, generally medical practitioners looked for better and better ways to diagnose and treat their patients. They recognized that there were different, specic maladies, and that these maladies caused specic symptoms. The location, type, and degree of pain or tenderness; localized or systemic heating; swelling; skin color; eye appearance; the color, texture, and odor of bodily discharges; heart, lung, and digestive system sounds all served to help diagnose ailments and guide treatment. Adept physicians knew that the better they could identify symptoms, the better their chances of curing their patients, and so they searched for better methods of determining symptoms.
