Hippocrates (c. 460 BCE - c. 370 BCE) was a Greek physician of the classical period, traditionally regarded as the founder of Western medicine as a rational discipline. [1] He is associated with the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of some sixty medical texts, and with the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical statement that has shaped medical practice for more than two millennia. [2] Little about his life can be established with certainty, and much of what circulates about him derives from later tradition. [3]
Life and sources
Hippocrates was born on the Aegean island of Kos, probably around 460 BCE, and is said to have died at Larissa in Thessaly at an advanced age. [1] The earliest reliable references to him are brief mentions by Plato, who names him as a physician of repute and an instructor of medicine for a fee. Nearly everything else — the family of Asclepiad healers, the travels, the anecdotes of his dealings with kings — comes from biographies written centuries after his death and is treated cautiously by historians. [3]
He worked as a physician and teacher on Kos, where a medical school grew around his name. Ancient tradition credits him with itinerant practice across Greece, a common pattern for physicians of the period.
The Hippocratic Corpus
The writings attributed to Hippocrates, collectively the Hippocratic Corpus, were assembled in Alexandria and contain treatises, case notes, lectures and aphorisms composed by several authors over roughly two centuries. [2] Scholars generally regard the collection as the product of a school rather than of one man, and there is no consensus on which texts, if any, Hippocrates wrote himself.
Works such as On the Sacred Disease argue that illnesses previously ascribed to divine punishment — epilepsy among them — have natural causes and can be studied like any other phenomenon. [1] Others, including Airs, Waters, Places, examine how climate, water supply and environment affect the health of populations, an early statement of what would later be called environmental and epidemiological thinking.
Medical method
The corpus emphasises careful observation of the patient, systematic record-keeping of the course of a disease, and prognosis — predicting how an illness will develop. [3] Treatment is generally conservative, favouring rest, diet, hygiene and allowing the body's own processes to work rather than aggressive intervention.
Physiology in the corpus rests on the theory of the four humours — blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile — whose balance was thought to determine health. [2] The theory is now obsolete, but it gave medicine a systematic framework and dominated European and Islamic practice into the modern era.
The Oath and legacy
The Hippocratic Oath, probably composed within the school rather than by Hippocrates himself, binds the physician to confidentiality, to act for the benefit of the patient, and to avoid deliberate harm. [2] Modernised versions are still recited at many medical school graduations.
Later physicians, above all Galen in the second century CE, built on the Hippocratic writings and secured their transmission through Byzantine, Arabic and medieval Latin scholarship. [1] Hippocrates remains the emblematic figure of medical ethics and of the idea that disease is a natural process open to rational study. [3]
