Hippocrates

Life

Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos into a family of physicians who claimed descent from Asclepius, the god of healing. He taught and practised medicine, travelled throughout Greece and was famous in his own lifetime: Plato mentions him as a well-known teacher of medicine. Beyond that, the details of his life are mostly legend.

Ideas

At a time when illness was often blamed on angry gods, the Hippocratic physicians argued that every disease had natural causes that could be studied. They paid close attention to symptoms, diet, climate and way of life, and they kept case notes on their patients. They also taught that the body contained four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and that health depended on their balance, a theory that dominated medicine until the nineteenth century.

The Oath

The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of around sixty medical texts written by Hippocrates and his followers. It includes the famous Oath, in which physicians swore to act for the benefit of the sick, to keep them from harm and to guard their secrets. Versions of it are still recited by medical graduates today.