The volume surveys medical thought and practice from earliest communal and ritual healing through the medical systems of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, the Hebrew scriptures, India, China and Japan, then moves into classical Greek and Roman medicine. It examines institutions and technical disciplines, including priestly and folk remedies, Hippocratic schools and the Corpus, anatomical and physiological inquiry in Alexandria, empiric, methodist and eclectic approaches, surgical and pharmacological literature, and Roman encyclopedists, while emphasising the reciprocal relation between broader cultural conditions and the development of medical ideas and techniques.