tohuwabohu said:
I was wondering exactly about the same. How could the folks back then get rid of the parasites without 'modern' medicine. I put modern into quotation marks because when I was reading about the antiparasitic drugs there is so many side effects that someone sensitive can confuse reaction to the drug with Herxheimer reaction. The antiparasitic protocol seems to be extremely stressful for the body.
I think that the ancients noticed the correspondence between high population density, promiscuity, and development of highly infectious and devastating epidemics. They would have noticed, also, that country people in monogamous relationships were less affected by such and possibly have drawn a conclusion. That's excluding the idea that any "inspiration" came to them informing them of the issues. So, perhaps their way of dealing with it was to impose a whole lot of purity rules about everything. The food, bathing, and sex laws of the OT are not original - they were derived from the Pythagoreans/Orphics. And some of the were wrong, so it seems they were either distorted over time, or wrong conclusions were drawn from observation.
So, the idea that they may have had effective measures against such pathogens as would arise in a densely populated area with a lot of promiscuity may be just wishful thinking. Their approach appears to have been prevention, not curing after the fact. Though, of course, the study of curing diseases was undertaken by the Pythagoreans and later the Therapeutae/Essenes (under the influence of the Pythagoreans i.e. after Hellenization and the spread of Greek ideas). One can't imagine that much came from the Babylonians or whatnot after reading translations of the many texts for curing things. Most of them were nonsensical magical incantations. So IF there was such knowledge, it didn't come from the Mesopotamian regions as far as I can tell. It may have come from the North with the Orphics, and possibly only as inspiration, not hard science.
Was there an ancient civilization that had high medical knowledge, greater than our own? Possible, but I think we'll look in vain for herbal remedies to be the transmitted lore of such. We've noticed that diet can certainly ameliorate symptoms of chronic conditions, but it - just as clearly - doesn't cure them. Perhaps herbals were used in the same context: amelioration, not cure.
Did alchemists stumble on this accidentally, making their potions and elixirs? That is quite possible considering some of the stuff they concocted and drank. And some of it could very well have been derived from plants/herbs, distilled out into concentrated forms. Just think of penicillin from moldy bread and LSD from ergot. I've got copies of some old herbal things and one notices that the alchemists were rather concentrated on plant properties alongside their gold transmutation experiments.
Obviously, we, today, are in a much better position to gain a truer understanding of these things because of the accessibility of information via the network, greatly enhanced by a network of multiple people following threads and clues and bringing back and synopsizing the most important material. In the same way, thanks to the work in cognitive science and bio-psychology, we have a better understanding of the ideas brought forward by Gurdjieff, and even earlier, the Stoics.
The take-home message from the Cs is, I think: don't waste a minute of your time: research, learn, share, and keep tinkering with your "receivership capabilities" so as to further enhance whatever gifts you were born with and minimize or eliminate your liabilities.