Hippocrates was a Greek physician from the 5th-4th centuries BC., revered for more than two thousand years as the father of medicine and the ideal prototype of his practice. The Ionians from ancient Greece had settled on the nearby Asian shores of the Aegean Sea. There they founded cities that would become centers of knowledge and culture, the result of Ionia’s location as a contact area between East and West.
Facing these coasts, those of present-day Turkey, the island of Cos was home to the famous school of the Asclepiades at the time. Which was contrary to magical-religious medicine and which was entrenched in positive, scientific medicine. Although the meaning of this term is still far from what medical science will use later.
Facts about Hippocrates
Full name
Hippocrates of Cos
Birth
around 460 BC
Death
around 370 BC
known for
hippocratic treatises
birth of hippocrates
The birth of the historical Hippocrates must have occurred around 460 BC on the island of Cos, located on the western coast of Asia Minor. His effective existence is attested by the fact that Plato, his contemporary although younger. He refers to him in two of his dialogues (protagoras and Phaedrus). Also Aristotle, in the Policyspeaks of the greatness of Hippocrates as a doctor.
The fame that Hippocrates must have already enjoyed during his lifetime contrasts, however, with the absence of ancient references to his writings. As well as the fact that the first of the biographies dedicated to him does not date from the first half of the second century AD. Half a millennium after his death, which probably occurred around 370 BC at Larissa, in the Greek region of Thessaly.
Hippocrates, the most famous of the Asclepiades
Hippocrates must have belonged to a family of asclepiades (so says Plato). Among the ancient Greeks, the practice of medicine had to be structured around the temples dedicated to the cult of Asclepius (the Latin Aesculapius), son of Apollo and disciple of the centaur Chiron, who taught him the arts of medicine and hunting..
These temples became places of pilgrimage where the sick went, often to undergo the “sacred sleep.” During which, supposedly, Asclepio appeared to them and gave them his beneficent advice. The priests of those temples ended up constituting a professional body of doctors who attended a kind of attached hospitals. They were called asclepiades either because they were supposed to have descended from Asclepius himself, or because their duties were inspired by him.
the family of hippocrates
The profession became secular and tended to be confined to certain families, one of which was that of Hippocrates at Cos. His father, Heraclides, was in charge of giving him his first training as a doctor. He, in turn, had received it from her own father, also called Hippocrates.. Another of the doctors who is cited as his teacher was Herodic of Selimbria, in Cnido. Tesalo and Draco, sons of Hippocrates, were also doctors and his successors. As were his son-in-law Polybus and a grandson, son of Thessalus, named Hippocrates.
Thessalus became famous at the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, between 413 and 399 BC. He was one of the founders of the so-called dogmatic school of medicine, and Galen called him the most eminent of Hippocrates’ sons. But the greatest of Hippocrates’ successors was Polybus. To whom is traditionally attributed the authorship of one of the most notable Hippocratic writings, the treatise on The Nature of Man.
Anecdote of Hippocrates with Democritus
Judging by the references contained in his works, Hippocrates must have traveled extensively throughout the Greek world. He residing successively on the island of Thassos, in Thrace and in Thessaly. He also visited Malinea, in Magnesia, and Cycicus, south of the Marmara Sea. Perdiccas II, King of Macedonia, and Artaxerxes II Mnemon, King of Persia, consulted him.
One of the best-known anecdotes attributed to him has to do with his alleged relationship (which perhaps did not exist) with Democritus, the famous philosopher from Abdera, whose atomistic theory represented the culmination of pre-Socratic thought: the Abderites, believing that their philosopher was mad, called Hippocrates to cure him; interrogated by the doctor, Democritus answered one of his questions by saying that he studied human madness. Whereupon Hippocrates firmly proclaimed that the philosopher was the wisest of men..
From the physical appearance of Hippocrates it is known that he was short, like many other great men. The tradition tells that on his grave the bees made hives whose honey had healing properties.
the hippocratic collection
Hippocrates was undoubtedly a great doctor and a great teacher of medicine; but no more than others were in his time. The reasons why his figure became so singular seem to be, rather, circumstantial.
Since the Alexandrian era, his fame began to grow and writings were attributed to him that, in general, were probably anonymous texts, prepared within certain medical schools..
This fame reached its apogee in the Roman world, through Galen’s comments, which made Hippocratres the “father of medicine.” Incarnation of the ideal doctor, at the same time that all the medical writings of the great Hellenic era, then already legendary, ended up being considered as his. However, the subsequent critical analysis of those writings revealed that they could not be the work of a single person. Nor could they come from a single place or all date from the same time. Today, the collection of these writings, the so-called “Hippocratic collection”, is admitted to be presided over by a common spirit, of which the name of the great physician of Cos is a symbol..
Central idea
The central idea of Hippocratic medicine is the conception of health as a balance. Maintained in the healthy organism thanks to the existence of a natural force that tends to restore it automatically when its alteration is not profound.
When said balance is broken due to illness, the doctor must come to the aid of that healing force of nature itself, the vis medicatrix naturae consecrated by the Latin expression. The doctor’s task thus essentially becomes one of letting nature work. Therefore, the treatment of the disease must consist, above all, of an adequate lifestyle: physical and spiritual rest, painkillers in the event of pain, diet, moderate exercises…
hippocratic therapy
Hippocratic therapy was based on the use of purgatives, emetics (to cause vomiting), cordials, emmenagogues (to cause menstruation), enemas and enemas, bleeding (although without resorting to leeches), starvation diets in order to evacuate the body, fomentations and baths, frictions and massages, water and barley broth (in Greek ptisane, and hence the term ’tisana’ ended up designating any type of infusion), wine and honey with water or vinegar (sugar sugarcane was hardly known in the West before the first Islamic conquests).
hippocratic theories
In the Hippocratic theories on the nature and constitution of the living organism, the function of air (pneuma) plays an important role and it seems that in the particular case of Hippocrates himself that importance was accentuated. In the previously mentioned treatise by Polybo, the theory of the four humors is formulated: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, which differ in proportion according to human temperaments and according to the seasons of the year. The proper proportion of these humors is regulated and maintained in each individual by its innate and characteristic nature.
The idea that health consists in the balance of the humors (isonomy), while illness occurs when one of them dominates over the others (monarchy), goes back to the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Crotona. Empedocles of Agrigento, the famous author of the theory of the four elements —fire, air, water, earth— as fundamental components of everything that exists, established that health or disease were conditioned by the balance or imbalance of these elements.
This doctrine was supplemented by that of the four primary qualities—hot, cold, wet, and dry—. Each of which, in the Hippocratic text cited, is assigned a preponderant role in the human body according to the succession of seasons throughout the year. The theory of the four temperaments was later developed and supplemented by Galen, the most famous physician in ancient Rome. It continued to play a central role in medicine until the 19th century and is still present in many expressions of common language.
The physicians of the Hippocratic school
The doctors of the Hippocratic school of Cos were distinguished from their most famous rivals, those belonging to the medical school of Knidos (some of whose texts also appear integrated into what is now known as the Hippocratic collection), by the fact that they showed a greater interest in the disease in general, as opposed to the concern of their colleagues for particular diseases. Hence, the prognosis, the ability to predict the course of the disease and the nature, fatal or not, of its end, was considered more important than diagnosis.
Physicians’ assessment
The good doctor was valued for his ability to form an idea of the successive stages of the disease from the first one and to foresee the critical days ahead.in which a symptomatic change in the patient’s gait could occur, both in the form of improvement and relapse, or the formation of an abscess or the expulsion of malignant material could also take place.
Hence the classification of fevers into tertians, quartans, etc., according to the length of the cycle that was supposed to govern their periodic appearance.. The importance attached to rhythmic development is explained by the fact that many of the diseases observed by Hippocratic physicians were manifestations of malaria, endemic to Greek territory.
The doctor in the Hippocratic writings
The image of the doctor that emerges from the writings of the Hippocratic collection is that of a professional committed to carrying out his task in an empirical and rational atmosphere that is expressly opposed to the magical and religious conception of primitive medicine.; In this sense, the text dedicated to epilepsy and the criticism that is dedicated there to its traditional name as “sacred disease” are usually cited as revealing.
Some texts even display radical empiricism and, in the name of a medicine described as “ancient”, condemn any speculation aimed at basing medical knowledge on cosmological principles, thus confronting other writings in the same collection that, as It has been said before that they founded medicine on some determined cosmology.
One of the…