MEDICAL

Medicine is the art and scienc of healing. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.
Contemporary medicine applies health science, biomedical research, and medical technology to diagnos and treat injury and disease, typically through medication, surgery, or some other form of therapy. The word medicine is derived from the Latin ars medicina, meaning the art of healing.
Though medical technology and clinical expertise are pivotal to contemporary medicine, successful face-to-face relief of actual suffering continues to require the application of ordinary human feeling and compassio, known in English as bedside manner.

Prehistoric medicine incorporated plants (herbalism), animal parts and minerals. In many cases these materials were used ritually as magical substances by priests, shamans, or medicine me. Well-known spiritual systems include animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits), spiritualism (an appeal to gods or communion with ancestor spirits); shamanism (the vesting of an individual with mystic powers); and divination (magically obtaining the truth). The field of medical anthropology studies the various prehistoric medical systems and their interaction with society.
Early records on medicine have been discovered from early Ayurvedic medicine in the . Early Greek doctor Hippocrates, who is also called the Father of Medicine, and Galen laid a foundation for later developments in a rational approach to medicine. After the fall of Rome and the onset of the Dark Ages, Islamic physicians made major medical breakthroughs, supported by the translation of Hippocrates' and Galen's works into Arabic. Notable Islamic medical pioneers include polymat Avicenn, who is also called the Father of Modern Medicine,Abulcasis, the father of surgery, , the father of experimental surgery, Ibn al-Nafis, the father of circulatory physiology, and , who is called the father of pediatrics, first disproved the Grecian theory of , which nevertheless remained influential in Western . While major developments in medicine were occurring in the Islamic world during the medieval period, the Western world remained dependent upon the Greco-Roman theory of humorism, which led to questionable treatments such as bloodletting. Islamic medicine and medieval medicine collided during the crusades, with Islamic doctors receiving mixed impressions. As the medieval ages ended, important early figures in medicine emerged in Europe, including Gabriele Falloppio and William Harvey.

An ancient Greek patient gets medical treatment: this (circa 480-470 BCE, now in , probably contained healing oil
The major shift in medical thinking was the gradual rejection, especially during the in the 14th and 15th centuries, of what may be called the 'traditional authority' approach to science and medicine. This was the notion that because some prominent person in the past said something must be so, then that was the way it was, and anything one observed to the contrary was an anomaly (which was paralleled by a similar shift in European society in general - see Copernics's rejection of Ptolem's theories on astronomy). Physicians like and Vesalius led the way in improving upon or indeed rejecting the theories of great authorities from the past (such as Hippocrates, and Galen), many of whose theories were in time discredited.
Modern scientific (where reSults are testable and reproducible) began to replace early Western traditions based on herbalism, the Greek "four humour" and other such pre-modern notions. The modern era really began with Robert Koch's discoveries around 1880 of the transmission of disease by bacteria, and then the discovery of antibiotics around 1900. The post-18th century