Question

1. How do you know that bad spirits cause disease? Have you ever seen one?

Answer 1

Ans) In classical era, There were two primary theories: god, and spirit/demon.

Purification (Diarrhea), or sweating out or vomiting
Disease was divine punishment for acts against the gods or God.
- Laws were made concerning religion and health there were a lot of laws made by religious organizations of what their members should and should not do regarding eating, drinking, etc, that were all trying to protect their health
- Sacrifices, offerings but if they did have bad health they had sacrifices and offerings.
Sin (against the gods), curse, disease-atonement (purification or sacrifice)-recovery or death cycle (this is a cycle, you sin, you get a curse, you get a disease, you do atonement, and either you recovery or die.
- It was often looked at that if someone was sick they brought it on their selves in someway than someone that wasn't ever sick was the better person. This happens today too like if someone gets cancer the first thing they ask is how did you got the cancer, did you smoke or drink?

- Physicians: for groups of persons that believed the illness to be a physical or natural cause

Priests (cure illness) illness is caused by a sin or punishment for something you did against the gods, so you would need a priest

- There also was a sorcerer/shaman/medicine man to ward of demons or the spirits

- In Egypt physicians were really very advanced in knowledge about how the body worked and they had medications to cure the ill. We are not taking about the normal medications as we have now, the book gave an example of some really bizarre things, but they did have a great deal of knowledge and use that.