Memorize Ancient Medicine: 60 History of Medicine Flashcards from Ötzi to Avicenna
Learn the history of ancient medicine with 60 flashcards: Edwin Smith Papyrus, Sushruta, the four humors, Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides and Baghdad's hospital.
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Flip It's History of Medicine deck (code VC5695, 60 cards) doesn't cover all of medical history. It stops around the year 1000. It runs from Ötzi's birch fungus to Avicenna, with no Black Death, no Harvey, no Pasteur. Treat it as an ancient medicine deck and it is a dense, well-sourced one.
Study this deck: History of Medicine
1 / 10What is the Hippocratic Oath?
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
What the cards actually test
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| What did Ötzi the Iceman (c. 3230 BC) carry as medicine? | Birch polypore, poppy seeds, sloe berries, sphagnum moss |
| Who wrote the Diagnostic Handbook in the 11th century BCE? | Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa |
| What is the Edwin Smith Papyrus known for? | A surgery textbook (c. 1600 BCE) almost devoid of magic |
| Who was the earliest known woman physician? | Peseshet, "Lady Overseer of the Lady Physicians" |
| What procedures does the Sushruta Samhita describe? | Rhinoplasty, ear-lobe repair, perineal lithotomy, cataract surgery |
| What is "Hippocratic fingers"? | Clubbing, a sign of chronic lung and cyanotic heart disease |
| What did Herophilus distinguish between? | Veins and arteries (arteries pulse, veins don't) |
| What did Dioscorides write? | De materia medica, 600+ herbal cures used for 1,500 years |
| When was the first Islamic hospital created? | 805 CE in Baghdad, under Harun al-Rashid |
Everything else the deck covers: yarrow in Palaeolithic caves, dental care at Riparo Fredian, Sumerian cuneiform prescriptions, the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, Hesy-Ra, Imhotep, the Houses of Life, the Huangdi Neijing, Zhang Zhongjing's Treatise on Cold Damage, acupuncture and moxibustion, the Atharvaveda, Charaka, the eight branches of Ayurveda, Asclepieia and enkoimesis, the Hippocratic Corpus, the terms Hippocrates coined (crisis, paroxysm, convalescence), acute vs chronic vs endemic vs epidemic, Erasistratus, Roman forceps and specula, Byzantine conjoined twins, Gondeshapur, al-Razi and Hunayn ibn Ishaq.
Build the timeline before you drill
The deck mostly moves forward in time, but the Greek section jumps around. Cards 27–34 cover the humors, 35–42 go back to Homer and Hippocrates, and Galen comes up twice. Before your first session, sort the cards into five regions: Prehistory → Mesopotamia/Egypt → China/India → Greece/Rome → Byzantium/Islam. Then tag each card with its region. When you're asked a "who" question, recalling the region first narrows it down to three or four names.
Complete the humor grid
The four humors take up eight cards, but the seasons only appear for two of them: black bile goes with autumn and blood with spring. Write the two missing cards: yellow bile = summer and phlegm = winter. That gives you a 4×3 grid (humor, season, temperament) that you can redraw from memory in 20 seconds. Drill it as one picture, not as eight separate facts.
Three cards to fix
- Card 44 says Galen discovered that blood circulates. He didn't. Galen thought the liver made blood and the body used it up. William Harvey described circulation in 1628. Rewrite the back.
- Card 27 credits Galen with the theory of humors. The theory goes back to the Hippocratic Corpus, and Galen systematized it. Card 2 gets this right.
- Card 47 remembers Vesalius only as a translator of Galen. His landmark book is De humani corporis fabrica (1543), which corrected Galen's anatomy. Add that card.
The Hippocratic Oath (card 1) is also traditionally attributed to Hippocrates rather than proven to be his work. If you want to follow the story past 1543, the History of Science article covers the same ancient world from the angle of astronomy and mathematics.
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