© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
By the late 17th century, as far as the nervous system was concerned, not much had changed for over two millennia since the Greeks and Romans rationalized existing ideas on the nature of disease (see The Concept of Disease, Walter Riese, 1953). But as Samuel Ludwin makes clear in ‘A tale of two books: milestones on the path to understanding multiple sclerosis’ (page 2224), medical history is not just the record of dates and details; rather, it describes the climate in which discoveries were made and mistakes perpetuated, with all the handicaps and weightings of social context. Magic medicine ignored the sick individual as a source of information. Plato (427–327 BC) believed in health as a state of harmony; disease was an excess, alteration or relocation of earth, fire, air and water (the body) and ‘soul’. Hippocrates (460–377 BC) internalized medicine, relating disease to the individual and illustrated
Cambridge
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
Related articles in Brain:
- From the Archives
- Alastair Compston
Brain 2005 128: 2219-2221.[Extract] [FREE Full Text]