Those responsible for establishing policies concerning medicine in the newly formed Greek state, used terms such as tramp or quack to protect official modern Greek medicine from the many popular practitioners and charismatic healers now identified with dangerous, criminal activities. Nevertheless, the terminology of official 18th century medicine which had already entered Greece since the mid 1700s, sounds as uncanny today as the language of quacks. The classifying of illnesses according to Brown’s theory, led to the use of purges, formulas to bring on vomiting and bloodletting. The Medical School of Athens was founded in the New Greek State in 1837, and dreamed of reviving the splendour of antiquity. The problems, however, that had to be tackled immediately were the epidemics. Kapodistrias had introduced a modern quarantine system to control epidemics of typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery. Nevertheless after the influx of refugees from Asia Minor, widespread malnutrition, the high levels of infant mortality, tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases led to the founding of the School of Public Health in 1930. This brought about the first systematic efforts to deal with threatening epidemics through government funding. Popular medicine, on the other hand, which is in the service of humanity and not of science, contributes to creating an ideology concerning health and illness and thus shows how many non-medical practices have relieved the sufferings of the human condition.