Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine

The narrative traces medical practice from ancient Greek healing cults and temple medicine through classical physicians and schools — Hippocratic methods, Alexandrian anatomy, and Galenic physiology — to Roman adoption and adaptation, surgical techniques, and public health measures such as aqueducts, baths, drainage, and sanitation. It surveys the rise of hospitals, Christian charitable care, and monastic medicine, and discusses medical instruments, pharmacology, and prevailing theories like empiricism and pneumatism, closing with the decline of classical medical learning and its transmission into later Byzantine and medieval contexts.