Ancient (BCE-40 CE)

ca. 2700 B.C. - Shen Nung originates acupuncture
ca. 1700 B.C. - Edwin Smith surgical papyrus written. First written record about the nervous system
ca. 500 B.C. - Alcmaion of Crotona dissects sensory nerves
ca. 500 B.C. - Alcmaion of Crotona describes the optic nerve

The Disability History Project is a community history project and we welcome your participation. This is an opportunity for disabled people to reclaim our history and determine how we want to define ourselves and our struggles. People with disabilities have an exciting and rich history that should be shared with the world. Please email us about anything that you would like to see become part of the Disability Social History Project, including your disabled heroes, important events in disability history, and resources.

Welcome to the Asclepion, a World Wide Web page devoted to the study of ancient medicine. This page was designed to be an internet source that presents the study of ancient medicine in a manner that is both accessible and useful to the general public and to students in the history of medicine courses at Indiana University Bloomington. Please feel free to browse and send comments or ask questions.

This is a brief "SYNOPSIS" of the History of Islamic Medicine. We are in the process of putting an in depth study of the "History of Islamic Medicine" on this page which will include biographies of some of the most prominent Islamic Physicians in history. Please keep a look out for this in the future. In the interim if you are interested email to:"hnagamia@pol.net

Although the Greeks created rational medicine, their work was not always or even fully scientific in the modern sense of the term. Like other Greek pioneers of science, the doctors were prone to think that much more could be discovered by mere reflection and argument than by practice and experiment. For in their time there was not yet a distinction between philosophy and science, including medicine. Hippocrates was the first to separate medicine from philosophy and disprove the idea that disease was a punishment for sin. Much of the traditional treatment for injuries and ailments practiced by the Greeks stemmed from folk medicine, a characteristic shared by the Greeks with other societies to this day.

The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Diderot, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Contributors included the most prominent philosophes: Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Marmontel, d’Holbach and Turgot, to name only a few. These great minds (and some lesser ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas.

The Time and Frequency Division, part of NIST's Physics Laboratory, maintains the standard for frequency and time interval for the United States, provides official time to the United States, and carries out a broad program of research and service activities in time and frequency metrology.

In classical Greece and Rome, only alcohol, the oldest documented compound of abuse, poses a significant problem. Opium is widely employed only as a medicine; great caution is advised in its use, it is seldom used alone, and the phenomena of dependence and abuse are not recorded. While cannabis use is widespread in Asia Minor and Assyria, there appears to be little use of cannabis in Greek and Roman cultures.

An Exhibition of Rare Books from the Collection of the Linda Hall Library

Welcome to our exhibition, celebrating the most glorious of scientific books, the celestial atlas. This electronic catalog will serve as a guide to the exhibition, but will also utilize the unique advantages of hypertext media to explore the history of celestial cartography from many vantage points.