Healing traditions of the world

Every human society has had to answer the same question: what do we do when someone falls ill? The answers arrived independently on every continent, and they are more alike than you would expect. Almost all of them describe balance, almost all use plants, almost all treat the mind and body as one thing, and almost all place healing inside a moral and religious life rather than beside it.

I have collected these pages because the subject deserves more than the two positions usually offered — that ancient medicine was superstition, or that it was secret wisdom modern science refuses to see. Neither is true. The record is far more interesting than either.

Traditional systems produced genuine discoveries: willow bark, cinchona, foxglove, opium, qinghao. They also produced bloodletting, mercury and a great many confident treatments that killed people. Both belong in an honest account.

A rough timeline

c. 3000 BCE
Sumerian clay tablets record plant remedies — among the oldest written prescriptions known
c. 2600 BCE
Imhotep in Egypt, later revered as a god of medicine
c. 1550 BCE
The Ebers Papyrus, over 700 Egyptian remedies
c. 1000–600 BCE
The Atharvaveda and the beginnings of Ayurveda in India
c. 400 BCE
Hippocrates in Greece separates medicine from priestcraft
c. 300 BCE–200 CE
Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas compiled; the Huangdi Neijing in China
c. 200 CE
Galen systematises humoral medicine; his authority lasts 1,400 years
1025 CE
Ibn Sina completes the Canon of Medicine, taught in Europe until the 1600s
1796
Jenner's smallpox vaccination; Hahnemann founds homeopathy the same decade
1840s–1890s
Anaesthesia, antisepsis, germ theory — medicine changes permanently
1928
Fleming and penicillin
1972
Tu Youyou isolates artemisinin from a 4th-century Chinese text; Nobel Prize 2015
2014
India establishes the Ministry of Ayush; WHO's Traditional Medicine Strategy runs alongside

Please read this first

This site is a personal account and a record of traditional practice, shared for information. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis, and not a treatment for any disease. I am not a doctor.

If you are unwell — and especially if you have a serious illness such as cancer, diabetes or heart disease — please stay under the care of a qualified physician. Nothing here should replace or delay that care.

More in this section

The ancient worldMesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome ChinaQi, five phases, herbs, artemisinin India's six systemsAyurveda, Siddha, Unani, Sowa Rigpa The Islamic worldIbn Sina, Al-Razi, the first hospitals Japan, Korea & beyondKampo, Hanbang, Thai and Vietnamese EuropeMonastic medicine, herbals, nature cure Indigenous traditionsAfrica, the Americas, Australia, Pacific From plant to medicineEleven drugs that began as folk remedies The modern turnGerm theory, trials, and where tradition sits now