---
title: "History of medicine"
chunk: 10/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_medicine"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:03.179404+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== India ====
Unani medicine, based on Avicenna's Canon of Medicine (ca. 1025), was developed in India throughout the medieval and Early Modern periods. Its use continued, especially in Muslim communities, during the Indian Sultanate and Mughal periods. Unani medicine is in some respects close to Ayurveda and to Early Modern European medicine. All share a theory of the presence of the elements (in Unani, as in Europe, they are considered to be fire, water, earth, and air) and humors in the human body. According to Unani physicians, these elements are present in different humoral fluids and their balance leads to health and their imbalance leads to illness.
Sanskrit medical literature of the Early Modern period included innovative works such as the Compendium of Śārṅgadhara (Skt. Śārṅgadharasaṃhitā, ca. 1350) and especially The Illumination of Bhāva (Bhāvaprakāśa, by Bhāvamiśra, ca. 1550). The latter work also contained an extensive dictionary of materia medica, and became a standard textbook used widely by ayurvedic practitioners in north India up to the present day (2024). Medical innovations of this period included pulse diagnosis, urine diagnosis, the use of mercury and china root to treat syphilis, and the increasing use of metallic ingredients in drugs.
By the 18th century CE, Ayurvedic medical therapy was still widely used among most of the population. Muslim rulers built large hospitals in 1595 in Hyderabad, and in Delhi in 1719, and numerous commentaries on ancient texts were written.

=== Europe ===

==== Events ====

===== European Age of Enlightenment =====
During the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th century, science was held in high esteem and physicians upgraded their social status by becoming more scientific. The health field was crowded with self-trained barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, drug peddlers, and charlatans.
Across Europe medical schools relied primarily on lectures and readings. The final year student would have limited clinical experience by trailing the professor through the wards. Laboratory work was uncommon, and dissections were rarely done because of legal restrictions on cadavers (though this was sometimes circumvented by illegal body snatching). Most schools were small, and only Edinburgh Medical School, Scotland, with 11,000 alumni, produced large numbers of graduates.

==== Places ====

===== Spain and the Spanish Empire =====

In the Spanish Empire, the viceregal capital of Mexico City was a site of medical training for physicians and the creation of hospitals. Epidemic disease had decimated indigenous populations starting with the early sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, when a black auxiliary in the armed forces of conqueror Hernán Cortés, with an active case of smallpox, set off a virgin land epidemic among indigenous peoples, Spanish allies and enemies alike. Aztec emperor Cuitlahuac died of smallpox. Disease was a significant factor in the Spanish conquest elsewhere as well.

Medical education instituted at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico chiefly served the needs of urban elites. Male and female curanderos or lay practitioners, attended to the ills of the popular classes. The Spanish crown began regulating the medical profession just a few years after the conquest, setting up the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicata, a board for licensing medical personnel in 1527. Licensing became more systematic after 1646 with physicians, druggists, surgeons, and bleeders requiring a license before they could publicly practice. Crown regulation of medical practice became more general in the Spanish empire.
Elites and the popular classes alike called on divine intervention in personal and society-wide health crises, such as the epidemic of 1737. The intervention of the Virgin of Guadalupe was depicted in a scene of dead and dying Indians, with elites on their knees praying for her aid. In the late eighteenth century, the crown began implementing secularizing policies on the Iberian peninsula and its overseas empire to control disease more systematically and scientifically.