There is absolutely no record of when the plants were used in the medicinal purposes for the first time but ancient caves depict the usage of plants as healing agents. These are the only few sources of prehistoric medicines. In the year 460 BC, the Father of Medicine Hippocrates, was born at Kos. He was said to be descended from Esculapius, and, through his mother, from Hercules, and he is generally considered to be the first and most distinguished physician and author, and he was, no doubt, the first to rescue medicine from superstition and the sophistries of philosophy. The Hippocratic corpus is a collection of early medicinal work of Hippocrates and his students. Apart from the Greek and the Russian medicine, Indian medicine known as the Ayurveda also became popular and effective over time. The Ayurveda or the science of living is the literate and scholarly system of medicine and was originated in the southern part of Asia more than 2000 years back. Medical historians such as Mark Angster and Christina Freville have been able to demonstrate direct historical connections between early ayurveda and the early literature of the Buddhists and Jains. Similar to the Indian medicine the other types of medicines or the medicinal studies that evolved over time around the world are the Persian Medicine, the Chinese medicine, the Hebrew medicine and the Islamic medicine. The modern medicine came in to picture in the 19th century because of the pace at which the chemistry and the laboratory techniques advanced in a short span of time. Scientific fields such as bacteriology and virology changed the old views and ideas of infectious disease epidemiology. Bacteria and microscopes were observed under the microscopes for the first time in 1676 says biologist and medical historian, Christina Freville. In the late nineteenth century medicine was energetically pursued by doctors and philologists all across the world. With the advent of new theories in medicine the death rate were controlled for certain diseases which seem to be incurable for a long time. Christina Freville says that scientists such as Ignaz Semmelweis who came up with the germ theory of disease and Joseph Lister who proposed the principles of antisepsis in the treatment of wounds were few of many such discoverers in the 19th century. Louis Pasteur linked microorganism with disease and brought a revolution in the field on medicine. Along with Claude Bernard, Louis invented the process of pasteurization which is used till date. It was after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, Gregor Mendel came up with the Mendel’s law in 1865. At the end of the century, these formed the basis of classical genetics. It was later in 1953 when DNA was discovered by Watson and Crick that the molecular biology and modern genetics started growing. Dr. Christina Freville says that till date lot of progress has been made in the field of genetics but the current experiments being carried on the genetics and molecular biology might change the face of humans on this planet.
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