Hippocrates (428–347 BCE)

Greek physician

Hippocrates was a physician, teacher, and author on the island of Cos in Greece. Little is known of his life. A corpus of roughly 60 Greek works (written between 420 and 350 BCE) has been associated with his name, though no text is certainly attributed to his hand. The sweep of the Hippocratic corpus includes texts on disease, deontology, therapy, and physiology among others. A cardinal feature of the corpus is its emphasis on natural, rather than divine or religious, etiologies of disease, often an imbalance of one of the four humors. The clearest evocation of this feature is in the case of epilepsy, which in other ancient sources was considered a religious or magical phenomenon. In the Hippocratic text The Sacred Disease, epilepsy was categorically identified as having “specific characteristics and a definite cause,” namely, a surfeit of the humor phlegm. Similarly, paralysis, the Hippocratic Aphorisms tell us, is a sign of melancholia, or too much black bile.

By and large, the Hippocratics were more interested in generating a prognosis, or description of the past, present, and future of a condition (particularly its likelihood of improving) rather than theoretical etiologies and even diagnoses, though both are manifest.

The Hippocratic corpus includes references to scoliosis, limb fractures and lameness, epilepsy, paralyses, congenital conditions, sexual dysfunction, general debility, autoamputation, pain, and sensory impairments. Deafness was often seen more as a diagnostic sign than as a disability. Etiologically, the bowels were linked to deafness, which connection was used by later authors as a therapeutic mandate. Therapy within the corpus includes fracture reduction, crutches, orthoses, and humoral management. Psychiatric and cognitive conditions are also well represented.

The power of the Hippocratic corpus exists in large measure because of the emphasis that later authors placed on it, particularly Galen (AD 129–ca. 199/216); the first university professors of the Middle Ages; and eighteenth-century Western clinicians. To this day, a form of the “Hippocratic Oath” is still taken by many graduating medical students, thus demonstrating the long influence of authors more than 2,400 years ago on the medical model.