CLAS 220 - Ancient Healing and Medicine

This course reconnects with early approaches to medicine, health and healing. We study and discuss earlier wisdom that informed health practices for centuries. These traditions shaped a role for the caregiver, healer- physician. They inherited traditions and practices from earlier generations and from their own schools and teachers. These early practitioners combined traditional, popular practices, with newer advances and medical discoveries. Health care givers and Physicians were philosophers, botanists, observers and students of nature who built the foundations of modern medicine and continued the ancient traditions that had been handed down to them. This course is not a critique of modern medical practices. It is a retrieval of other and earlier ideas and practices about health and wellness. Offered occasionally. (4 Credits)