History of Medicine

The history of medicine studies how medical theory, diagnosis and healing practice developed across cultures and periods, drawing on primary medical treatises, case records, hospital registers and excavated material remains. The German physician Karl Sudhoff took over and rebuilt the pioneering Leipzig chair for the history of medicine in the first years of the twentieth century, expanding it into a dedicated research institute that gave the field a stable academic home and a professional identity distinct from being written, as an afterthought, by practicing physicians summarizing their own field's past.

Healing was, for most of documented history, inseparable from religious practice, temple medicine, exorcism of illness attributed to spirits, ritual purification tied to disease and pilgrimage undertaken specifically for cure, and the history of medicine gives the atlas the documented clinical and theoretical record needed to describe what a period actually understood about a given illness alongside the religious explanation and remedy a tradition offered for the same condition. Healing deities, saints and ritual specialists are described in the atlas against this independently documented medical background rather than only against the tradition's own account of their power.