Читать книгу The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity - Roy Porter - Страница 18

AT THE END OF THE LAST ICE AGE about ten thousand years ago, a revolution began which decisively changed the symbiosis of society and disease. As we saw in the previous chapter, communities learned to master animals, to herd them for food, yoke them for traction, and spur them to war. Familiarity with soils, seeds and seasons made it possible to harvest crops regularly. Settlements grew, and with them arts and crafts. Story-telling and public memory were cultivated and the gods propitiated through priestly rituals. With the Bronze Age (from about 4000 BC), metal-working was improved, the wheel exploited, the reckoning of time and space rationalized and the calendar invented. Learning was encouraged, cities administered, tributes extracted, treasure hoarded, laws promulgated, empires enlarged. All such developments – the ABC of civilization – brought new approaches to healing and, for the first time, the writing down of medical practice. Medicine entered history.