What were the major differences between temple medicine and the type of medicine practiced by Alcmaeon and the Hippocratics?
In The Odyssey, Homer suggested medical practitioners that were roaming around selling their services to anyone needed by other peoples. The successful practitioners gained a reputation by becoming god like features and thus, temples were designed in their honor after their deaths. Other temples were named in honor of the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius.
At the temples, priests practiced medicine in accordance with the major teachings of the famous late practitioners. The priests kept the secrets of these teachings and thus, this temple medicine became very popular. This temple medicine was considered to be more effective against severe ailment problems because treatment was accompanied by an abundance of ritual and other ceremony functions.
During the course of temple medicine, patients need to be waiting for seeing by a priest, drink holy water, wear special robes and sleep in a sanctuary. During sleep conditions, the patient had a dream in which a priest or god directly cures the patient or either tell about the cure procedure in a special manner.
Alcmaeon practiced naturalistic medicine and equated health with a balance of different conditions like cold, warm, sweet and bitter. If one or more qualities were dominating in a person’s system, it results in sickness. Its viewpoint of health considers as a balance and harmony of disease that drastically treated by medicine and disappears in a given period of time. He also practiced temple medicine with magic and superstition to reach the physiological information by studying psychological functioning.
Hippocrates was considered as the father of medicine and forcefully attacked the version of supernatural medicine. He suggests that all illnesses had natural and supernatural causes and also strongly suggests that the body has the capacity to heal itself by facilitating natural healing. He used as a concept of temple medicine to emphasized on treating the patient and not a disease.