ABSTRACT
Although the height of their inuence lasted from 500 bce to about 500 ce, the ancient Greeks set the standard for Western pharmacy and medicine until germ theory was established scientically in the late nineteenth century. How did this come to be? The short answer is the birth of free thought began relatively unencumbered in ancient Greece. The geography of Greece had a profound impact upon its cultural development. The Greek peninsula was replete with rocky hills composed of chalky soil that compelled the Greeks to look outward from their land to trade with other civilizations for the food they could not grow themselves. Most notably, there was no single river system that connected the hundreds of city-states and islands, which allowed them to grow independently from one another. Without a strong central government or a centralized priestly caste, the ancient Greeks were free to generate many forms of thought and experiment with them. This freedom of thought allowed such talented outliers such as Hippocrates of Cos (c.460-377 bce) and Pedanios Dioscorides (c.40-90 ce) to transform the practice of medicine and pharmacy, respectively.
