Greek East preserved its ancient heritage. Justinian even succeeded in
reconquering Italy, Africa, and part of Spain, and reuniting the Roman
Empire. But the reunification did not long outlast him. Culturally,
Antiquity faded away slowly, but politically the East, even before the onset
of the Arab conquests in 634, had become the Byzantine Empire.”^17
During the final breakup of the Roman Empire, Greek culture (and
medicine) continued to spread throughout the Middle East, first to Syria,
then to Persia, and finally to the Mohammedan world. “Several of the
Prophet’s successors (Mohammed died in C.E. 632) ... were great patrons
of Greek learning, and especially of medicine. The Arabian scholars
imbibed Aristotle and Galen with avidity.”^18 As we shall see, Arab
scholars kept the faith, so to speak, of Hippocrates and Galen, and their
writings were translated from Greek and Latin into Arabic. These Arab
language books, serving as repositories of ancient wisdom, awaited
translation back into Latin at an appropriate time—a time of awakening—
the Renaissance.
Homo sapiens have been on earth for some 250,000 years, but modern
man has existed 8,000 years, which equates to 300 generations. On a single
sheet of paper, you could write the word “great” 300 times; each “great”
would represent a particular ancestor of yours, ending with our common
biological “Adam,” the first modern man.
So we are left contemplating 295 generations of vulnerability,
completely at the mercy of nature; five generations blessed to exist under
the auspices of “good medicine”; and two generations thriving in an era of
modern medicine and what I will call the implant revolution. The Greco-
Roman domination of medicine persisted into the 16th century, finally
undermined by an elegantly simple innovation that revolutionized
humanity’s ability to communicate, allowing incremental advances in the
understanding of the way our bodies work, and then, later, dynamic leaps
forward with the invention of surgery.