Illness In Ancient Mesopotamia And Ancient China

Illness and Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient China Disease and illness are commonly used interchangeably, but the distinction between the two had to be made in order to successfully study how culture plays into medicine. Disease can be seen as the pathological cause of illness, and illness is a perception about disease that a society constructs. The cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient China had many effects on the perception of illness. Illness has been around for as long as life has inhabited this earth, and different civilizations treated illness based on cultural beliefs. The main mission of historians is to determine how culture had an effect on the treatment of illness in different societies. Societal norms, religion, and location

The ancient civilization of Mesopotamia was situated between the Tigres and Euphrates Rivers (Magnar 25). These rivers would flood annually causing the soil to be fertilized, but it also could have led to the spread of illnesses. Mesopotamia was set up as many separate city states with a definitive social structure (Magnar 26). Everybody knew where they fit into the societal picture, and this could have led to an unfair treatment of those who were ill. Clay tablets and Hammurabi’s code are the clearest cut evidence that historians have used to look into illness in Ancient Mesopotamia. Religion also played a large role in the treatment of illness in Ancient Mesopotamia because at the beginning of the civilization, illness was thought to be a largely religious encounter. Only later did this ideology change when a distinction was made between the kinds of healers that were present in society. The evidence of illness in Ancient Mesopotamia is different in most ways than the Ancient Chinese

One of the most effective ways that gave historians a glimpse into how illness affected Ancient China was through the treatment of epilepsy. This disease was first described in the Ancient Chinese text called The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. There is not much initial information about how the disease was treated, but the text does say that if it wasn’t treated, the epileptic attacks would become more frequent. A later text called Zhu Bing Yuan Hou Lun written by Cao Yuan Fang was the first to successfully classify the difference between the different types of epilepsy. The different types were categorized by the visceral symptoms that the patient would present during an attack. These different types were thought to occur due to different imbalances in Yin and Yang. This principle is the leading methodology in Ancient Chinese medicine. Most, if not all, treatments that doctors called for were attempting to restore the imbalances in Yin and Yang (Magnar 72). Although it may seem easy to extrapolate the ideas and methods used in this time period, there are some distinct limitations that one must be aware of before making any conclusions (Anderson