Disease

It was when the more fashionable doctors in Italy, in imitation of the old Romans, despising the work of the hand, began to delegate to slaves the manual attentions they deemed necessary for their patients ... that the art of medicine went to ruin.
— Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564), De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543).

Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,
And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus,
Olde Ypocras, Haly and Galyen,
Serapion, Razis, and Avycen,
Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn,
Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn.
— Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 – 1400), Canterbury Tales, Prologue, lines 429 – 434.

If anyone wishes to observe the works of Nature, he should put his trust not in books on anatomy but in his own eyes and either come to me, or consult one of my associates, or alone by himself, industriously practise exercises in dissection; but so long as he only reads, he will be more likely to believe all the earlier anatomists, because there are so many of them.
— Galen (c. 130 – c. 200), On the usefulness of parts of the body.

Will you have one example of the ancient controversy in physic? Herophilus lodges the original cause of all diseases in the humours; Erasistratus, in the blood of the arteries; Asclepiades, in the invisible atoms of the pores; Alcmaeon, in the exuberance or defect of our bodily strength; Diocles, in the inequality of the elements of which the body is composed, and in the quality of the air we breathe; Strato, in the abundance, crudity, and corruption of the nourishment we take; and Hippocrates lodges it in the spirits. There is a certain friend of theirs, whom they know better than I, who declares upon this subject, “that the most important science in practice among us, as that which is entrusted with our health and conservation, is, by ill luck, the most uncertain, the most perplexed, and agitated with the greatest mutations.” There is no great danger in our mistaking the height of the sun, or the fraction of some astronomical computation: but here, where our whole being is concerned, ‘tis not wisdom to abandon ourselves to the mercy of the agitation of so many contrary winds.
— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533 – 1592).

… specialising in diseases of the eyes, others of the head, others of the teeth, others of the stomach and so on; while others again, deal with the sorts of troubles which cannot exactly be localised.
— Herodotus (c.485 – 425 BCE), on medical specialisations in Egypt.

Disease can never be conquered, can never be quelled by emotion’s wailful screaming or faith’s cymballic prayer. It can only be conquered by the energy of humanity and the cunning in the mind of man. In the patience of a Curie, in the enlightenment of a Faraday, a Rutherford, a Pasteur, a Nightingale, and all other apostles of light and cleanliness, rather than of a woebegone godliness, we shall find final deliverance from plague, pestilence, and famine.
— Sean O’Casey (1884-1964), Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well.

It seems to me that the so-called sacred disease [epilepsy] is no more divine than any other. It has a natural cause, just as other diseases have. Men call it divine because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, there would be no end of divine things.
— Hippocrates (c. 460 – c. 375 BCE).

Our authority says that when the rats die, the fleas that infest them escape, taking with them the destructive germs. Thus every flea that hops in one’s clothes during the presence of plague in the country may be the carrier of pestilence, and while drawing blood in the nature of its kind, infuse a human with the horrible and loathsome disease.
—  Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton), 6 January 1900, 5.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.