Adolescent Health Care And Medicine

Herbal medicine has great antiquity, with therapeutic roots extending back to ancient Egypt in what was then known as Khemet or Tamare.

In the written record, the study of herbs dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who described well-established medicinal uses for such plants as laurel, caraway, and thyme.

The ancient Egyptians who were themselves actual descendants of the near mythical and pre-historic Sumerian civilizations are credited to have had the worlds earliest holistic medicine systems. These systems were officially endorsed and recognized by even the almighty priest class that wielded such enormous powers over the populace.

Ancient Egyptian medicine traditions of 1000 B.C. and of an even much much earlier period, are known to have used garlic, opium, castor oil, coriander, mint, indigo, and other herbs for medicine and the Old Testament also mentions herb use and cultivation, including mandrake, vetch, caraway, wheat, barley, and rye. This is an over simplification however as Egyptians had an almost universally revered reputation as practitioners of highly sophisticated forms of medicine. The excellent embalming of mummies is a prime example of an Egyptian practice which could be traced even further back in time to near pre-historical times by Egyptian calendars’ reckoning. Records of the existence of these highly sophisticated healing systems are just beginning to emerge with the discoveries of new methods of understanding the language semantics of antiquity Egypt.

Like almost every other invention or technological advancement in antiquity (the pre-historic Sumerians and their predecessors in early Egyptian kingdoms) these therapeutic systems were then transferred and adopted by the outside world through centuries and millenniums of interactions and contacts.

Chinese herbal medicine like it’s near counterpart in Egypt also has great antiquity, with therapeutic roots extending back to Zhou Dynasty, Late Bronze/Early Iron Age at about 2500 to 3000 years ago. From its shamanistic origins, herbalism in archaic China evolved in response to causation or origination concepts current at the time. These notions of the causes of disease in human society related directly to the troubled socio-economic environment that prevailed in early China in the latter half of the first millennium BC. Read the rest of this entry »