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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 3882302, member: 72790&quot;]Indeed there should. If I might relate something from my teaching days. At the start of the school year I would introduce my students to the study of history, often their first experience in history as a discipline. I would ask for a show of hands if they recognized as important historical figures a list of famous people I rattled off. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Nero, Atilla the Hun, Richard the Lion Heart, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Hernando Cortez, Pizzaro, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Dwight Eisenhower. Almost always every hand went up. Then I asked the same from a second list. Hippocrates of Cos, Aesculapius, Galen, Avicenna, Averroes, Paracelsus, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Joseph Morton, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Joseph Lister, Koch, Fleming, and Salk. With the exception of Jonas Salk whom some recognized, it was brachial paralysis. The point I wanted to make at that time, and here, was that history makes a great deal of figures who made great use of lethal violence to achieve their goals. More bluntly, they killed a lot of people in achieving historical immortality. The second list was, of course, those whose achievements in the field of medical science saved many, many lives. Not quite the fame of those who achieved their greatness through lethal violence. It is a shame that we do not more honor our greatest healers in statuary, coinage, movies and literature but I suppose that says a great deal about what history is (the list of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, according to Jacob Burkhart) but also a great deal about us as well, as we prefer biographies of those in the first list to those in the second. As for the ancient numismatics of this, for every image of Asklepios, or Hygeia, or Salus from the Classical world there are twenty of Ares or Mars. Such is human nature.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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