This work gives a comprehensive overview and underlines analogies, correlations, and differences among social conditions, intellectual movements, political events, paradigms and beliefs in an effort to identify logical threads to navigate among the immense number of facts and data of the history of medicine. The complete work will consist of eight volumes. Volume 1: Primitive and Ancient Medicine Includes chapters on primitive and naturalistic medicine as well as Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian, biblical, and American pre-Columbian practices.