premise: Traditionally medicine was the science of curing illness with treatments. For thousands of years people would have used plants and would have turned to priests for cures. In more recent times illness has been attributed less to the intervention of gods or magic and instead to natural causes. Medicine today is as much concerned with prevention as cure. Doctors use treatments of many types, including radiation and vaccination, both of which were unknown until very recent times. Other treatments have been known about and practised for centuries. Muslim doctors were skilled surgeons and treated pain with opium. When Europeans first reached the Americas they found healers who used many plants to cure illnesses. The Europeans adopted many of these treatments and some are still effective and in use today.
hypothesis: Medicine is a science that owes its success to modern treatments.