Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/41

25 Care of Sick in Ancient World 25 The practical aspect of Assyrian medical lore is given in the Code of Hammurabi (2250 B.C.), which shows an organization of medical treatment and of surgery, with fixed fees, and also with definite penalties for failures to effect cures. Centuries before the Christian era, we are told, India had attained to an advanced and enlight ened civilization in which women held. The health an enviable position. The Vedas, the religion of sacred books of India, tell of these an- cient things. With respect to health matters it was believed that, originally, there had been no sin or disease in the world, but that man, gradually falling away from his original purity, had brought these sorrows upon himself, whereupon Brahma in pity had given him the Ayur-Veda, the books treating of the cure and prevention of disease. There were, in the ancient mythology, twin brothers, children of the life-giving Sun, one of whom practised medicine and the other surgery. There were also two famous mortals, about whose human talents myths may have clustered — Susruta, a physician who lived fourteen centuries B.C., and Charaka, who lived about three hundred years B.C. The latter was supposed to have inherited all the wis- dom of the serpent-god of the thousand heads, who was the repository of all the sciences, es-