This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Medicine is the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease and injury in the living body, tested against controlled outcomes rather than against tradition or authority alone. Its subject is the structure and function of the human body and the illness and injury that can affect it, approached through clinical observation and evidence based treatment rather than through ritual or belief, and its method depends on evidence that can be checked, an intervention either measurably helps or it does not, rather than on the authority of who prescribes it.
The field's separation from purely religious and magical healing is usually dated to the Hippocratic writings of around 400 BCE, whose central argument was that illness has natural causes that can be observed and treated, not divine causes that can only be appeased. That argument, more than any single discovery, is what founded medicine as a natural science distinct from temple healing and priestly cure, and the field has been classified among the natural sciences ever since, its claims tested against physical outcomes rather than doctrinal ones.
Because so much of what a religious tradition asks of the body, a healing rite, a dietary law, a purity rule about illness or the dead, touches ground medicine also studies, medicine supplies the clinical basis this atlas draws on wherever a tradition's practice meets the physical body. Where a religious account of a healing rests on a claim about the body itself, rather than about the meaning attached to it, medicine is the natural science standard that claim is checked against.