Main article: History of medicine
The earliest type of medicine in most cultures was the use of
empirical natural resources like plants (herbalism), animal
parts and minerals. In all societies, including Western ones,
there were also religious, ritual and magical resources.
In aboriginal societies, there is a large scope of medical
systems related to religious thinking, cultural experience,
and natural resources. The religious ones more known are:
animism (the notion of inanimate objects having spirits);
spiritualism (here meaning an appeal to gods or communion
with ancestor spirits); shamanism (the vesting of an individual
with mystic powers); and divination (the supposed obtaining of
truth by magic means). The field of medical anthropology studies the various medical
systems and their interaction with society, while prehistoric medicine addresses
diagnosis and treatment in prehistoric times.
The practice of medicine developed gradually in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, China,
Greece, Persia, the Islamic world, medieval Europe and early modern period in Persia
(Rhazes and Avicenna), Spain (Abulcasis and Avenzoar), Syria/Egypt (Ibn al-Nafis, 13th century),
Italy (Gabriele Falloppio, 16th century), England (William Harvey, 17th century).
Medicine as it is now practiced largely developed during the 19th and 20th centuries
in Germany (Rudolf Virchow, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, Robert Koch), Austria (Karl Landsteiner,
Otto Loewi), United Kingdom (Edward Jenner, Alexander Fleming, Joseph Lister, Francis Crick),
New Zealand (Maurice Wilkins), Australia (Howard Floery, Frank Macfarlane Burnet), Russia
(Nikolai Korotkov), United States (William Williams Keen, Harvey Cushing, William Coley,
James D. Watson), Italy (Salvador Luria), Switzerland (Alexandre Yersin), Japan (Kitasato Shibasaburo),
and France (Jean-Martin Charcot, Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, Paul Broca and others).
The new "scientific" or "experimental" medicine (where results are testable and repeatable)
replaced early Western traditions of medicine, based on herbalism, the Greek "four humours"
and other pre-modern theories.