Hippocrates

• Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 BCE) is considered to be the Father of Western Medicine and was the son of a Physician.
• He was born and worked on the island of Cos in Greece and died in Thessaly, central Greece.

Biography

• Hippocrates founded a medical school and library of over 50 medical works on Cos.
• He became a Tutor and taught his students all his knowledge by giving lessons under a Plane Tree,
  After qualifying, they took an oath under this same tree, to conduct themselves professionally.
• Hippocrates taught his students to adopt a professional bedside manner to inspire confidence in their patients. To look clean, healthy and well fed, whilst presenting a grave manner tempered by kindness.

Beliefs

1. The Four Humours.
   • He used this Theory as the basis of all medicine.
2. Medicine not a Philosophy.
   • He thought that medicine was not a philosophy, and should be practised on a case by case basis, and not on first principles.
3. The Case histories.
   • He created a list of case histories to study, where more than half the patients did not survive, mostly of endemic diseases such as colds, consumption and pneumonia, amongst others.
4. Scientific Rationalism.
   • He advocated a more scientific rationalism in an age where people believed that illness was Divine in origin. For instance, he urged Physicians to look for a natural, instead of a divine cause, for the Sacred Disease of Epilepsy.
5. Physical examination.
   • He recommended physical examination of the patient and believed specific diseases had specific causes.
6. Overall Health.
   • General condition of the patient as part of the diagnosis: Hippocrates broke with tradition by taking into account the patients overall health when diagnosing an illness.
   • He did not just concentrate on the affected part of the patient’s body.
7. Classification of Diseases:
   • He wrote a list of the symptoms of the most common diseases.
8. Mental illness:
   • He didn’t just prescribe bleeding and laxatives, but also psychotherapy.
9. Surgery:
   • He prescribed surgery for wounds, and also cauterisation or burning with a hot iron to heal the wound.
10. Dislocated Joints:
    • He described their condition and how to slip the joint back into position.
11. Fractures:
    • And also how to recognise fractures and reset them.
12. Different solutions for the same illness.
    • Hippocrates therefore asserted that the same illness could require different treatments, depending on the person’s build, temperament and age.
    • The best example of this was when he cured King Perdiccas of Macedonia. The King’s own physician had been unable to cure him. Hippocrates diagnosed the King with stress and cured him by a treatment of Herbs.
13. Balanced Lifestyle:
    • He recommended an orderly life without excess.
14. Healthy Diet:
    • He blamed many illnesses on an unhealthy diet and impure air, recommending fresh fruit and vegetables.
15. Nature, as a healer:
    • He believed that the body was capable of curing itself.
    • He believed and stated: ‘Nature, acts without doctors.’ And often dismissed surgery or drugs completely.

Weaknesses of his theories

• Hippocrates had no knowledge of human anatomy because, as the ancient Greeks revered the dead, they considered human dissection to be taboo.
• Hippocrates had no understanding about the circulation of the blood in the body and the role of the heart.

Works

Although no Works written by Hippocrates directly are known, he is strongly associated with the following:

• The Book of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms
  • A collection of 406 Aphorisms were collected and kept in the library of Cos medical school.
    1. ‘Desperate ills call for desperate remedies.’
    2. ‘Life is short and the art long; opportunity is fleeting,
       experience fallacious, judgement is difficult’
    3. ‘In every disease it is a good sign when the patient’s intellect
       is sound and he enjoys his food; the opposite is a bad sign’
    4. ‘Walking is man’s best medicine.’
    5. ‘The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force in getting well.’
    6. ‘Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.’

• Corpus Hippocraticum ‘The Hippocratic Corpus’ (or Writings)
  • A collection of 60 volumes of works on medicine, strongly associated with Hippocrates and his contemporaries, although we know of no work by him directly.
  • Not all works survived, and some are only known in their translations from Arabic, Hebrew or Latin.

• The Hippocratic Oath
  • This is an Oath from a document attributed to Hippocrates from the Hippocratic Corpus.
  • It lists the Ethics to be observed by Medical Practitioners.

Sources

• Soranus of Ephesus (1st-2nd century CE)
  • Life of Hippocrates