On 6/8/2011 5:39 AM, Warp wrote:
> nemesis<nam### [at] gmailcom>  wrote:
>> BTW, some times japanese manga comes up with some interesting thoughts.  I read
>> in Blade of the Immortal a suggestion that europeans had quite a better grasp on
>> medicine as opposed to the traditional chinese medicine because they had quite
>> good knowledge of the human body and its inner workings for all the centuries
>> worth of painful and barbaric tortures and death penalties.  Europeans were
>> making surgery while chinese were still drinking bitter tea.
>
>> I'm sure there was plenty of torture in china too, but while europeans were
>> cracking open bodies and letting them rot in public places during the dark ages,
>> china was in the height of a sophisticated civilization.  Death penalties were
>> usually carried out quickly rather than in agony.
>
>    Interesting hypothesis, but I don't think it's the real explanation.
> On the contrary, medicine in the middle ages was pretty much stagnant
> because the church had forbidden the study of corpses. It was not until
> the age of enlightenment, when science successfully separated itself from
> the church that people got to investigate how stuff really works and things
> got to progress forward.
>
Actually, it was often worse than that. A lot of stuff had to be 
"reinvented", because, while Galen had come up with a lot of instruments 
and methods, those where declared, by the same church, illegal, as they 
did with any else not, "approved by them, or invented by 'their' 
scholars". It didn't just stagnate, in some respects it went backwards.

Post a reply to this message