Subject
Medicine
Medicine. The diagnosis and treatment of illness and injury, and the practitioners, institutions, and training that deliver it. The anchor is the Edwin Smith Papyrus of about 1600 BCE, a surgical treatise organized as forty-eight cases, each with examination, diagnosis, and prognosis, and remarkable chiefly for what it omits: the cases are handled by observation and intervention rather than by incantation. The row’s own basis notes an earlier document — the Kahun gynaecological papyrus of about 1800 BCE, the oldest known medical text of any kind — which would move the date two centuries.
Boundaries. Medicine is diagnosis and treatment. The study of drugs is Pharmacology; the health of populations as a collective object is Public health; the biology underlying both is Biology.