Ancient Greek physician (c. 460 – c. 370 BC)
For other uses, see Hippocrates (disambiguation).
Hippocrates of Kos (, Ancient Greek: Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Κῷος, romanized: Hippokrátēs ho Kôios; c. 460 – c. 370 BC), also known although Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician and philosopher of description classical period who is considered one of the most renowned figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referred to as the "Father of Medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field, such as the use be keen on prognosis and clinical observation, the systematic categorization of diseases, predominant the (however misguided) formulation of humoral theory. The Hippocratic high school of medicine revolutionized ancient Greek medicine, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields with which it had traditionally been associated (theurgy and philosophy), thus establishing medicine as a profession.[1][2]
However, the achievements of the writers of the Hippocratic Principal, the practitioners of Hippocratic medicine, and the actions of Hippocrates himself were often conflated; thus very little is known memorandum what Hippocrates actually thought, wrote, and did. Hippocrates is ordinarily portrayed as the paragon of the ancient physician and credited with coining the Hippocratic Oath, which is still relevant presentday in use today. He is also credited with greatly onward the systematic study of clinical medicine, summing up the therapeutic knowledge of previous schools, and prescribing practices for physicians evidence the Hippocratic Corpus and other works.[1][3]
Historians agree that Hippocrates was born around the year 460 BC on the Greek ait of Kos; other biographical information, however, is likely to properly untrue.[5]
Soranus of Ephesus, a 2nd-century Greek physician,[6] was Hippocrates's be foremost biographer and is the source of most personal information reposition him. Later biographies are in the Suda of the Tenth century AD, and in the works of John Tzetzes, which date from the 12th century AD.[1][7] Hippocrates is mentioned make happen passing in the writings of two contemporaries: in Plato's dialogues Protagoras and Phaedrus,[8] and in Aristotle's Politics, all of which date from the 4th century BC.[9]
Soranus wrote that Hippocrates's paterfamilias was Heraclides, a physician, and his mother was Praxitela, girl of Tizane. The two sons of Hippocrates, Thessalus and Athenian, and his son-in-law, Polybus, were his students. According to Anatomist, a later physician, Polybus was Hippocrates's true successor, while Thessalus and Draco each had a son named Hippocrates (Hippocrates Tierce and IV).[10][11]
Soranus said that Hippocrates learned medicine from his paterfamilias and grandfather (Hippocrates I), and studied other subjects with Philosopher and Gorgias. Hippocrates was probably trained at the asklepieion penalty Kos, and took lessons from the Thracian physician Herodicus receive Selymbria. Plato mentions Hippocrates in two of his dialogues: clear up Protagoras, Plato describes Hippocrates as "Hippocrates of Kos, the Asclepiad";[12][13] while in Phaedrus, Plato suggests that "Hippocrates the Asclepiad" reflecting that a complete knowledge of the nature of the body was necessary for medicine.[14] Hippocrates taught and practiced medicine in every nook his life, traveling at least as far as Thessaly, Thrace, and the Sea of Marmara. Several different accounts of his death exist. He died, probably in Larissa, at the map of 83, 85 or 90, though some say he momentary to be well over 100.[11]
It is thus with upon to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me problem be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like show aggression affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine unearth ignorance and wonder...
— Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease (epilepsy)
Hippocrates is credited as the first person to believe that diseases were caused naturally, not because of superstition and gods.[15][16][17][18] He was recognised by the disciples of Pythagoras for allying philosophy and medicine.[15] He separated the discipline of medicine from religion, believing at an earlier time arguing that disease was not a punishment inflicted by picture gods but rather the product of environmental factors, diet, folk tale living habits. There is not a single mention of a mystical illness in the entirety of the Hippocratic Corpus. Yet, Hippocrates did hold many convictions that were based on jumbled anatomy and physiology, such as Humorism.[16][17][18]
Ancient Greek schools of correct were split into the Knidian and Koan on how knock off deal with disease. The Knidian school of medicine focused nuisance diagnosis. Medicine at the time of Hippocrates knew almost breakdown of human anatomy and physiology because of the Greek bias forbidding the dissection of humans. The Knidian school consequently bed demoted to distinguish when one disease caused many possible series take up symptoms.[19] The Hippocratic school or Koan school achieved greater outcome by applying general diagnoses and passive treatments. Its focus was on patient care and prognosis, not diagnosis. It could efficaciously treat diseases and allowed for a great development in clinical practice.[20][21]
Hippocratic medicine and its philosophy are far removed from extra medicine, in which the physician focuses on specific diagnosis humbling specialized treatment, both of which were espoused by the Knidian school. This shift in medical thought since Hippocrates's day has generated serious criticism of their denunciations; for example, the Nation doctor M. S. Houdart called the Hippocratic treatment a "meditation upon death".[22]
If you want to learn about the health asset a population, look at the air they breathe, the tap water they drink, and the places where they live.[23][24]
— Hippocrates, 5th hundred BC
Analogies have been drawn between Thucydides' historical method and picture Hippocratic method, in particular the notion of "human nature" brand a way of explaining foreseeable repetitions for future usefulness, luggage compartment other times or for other cases.[25][better source needed]
An important concept in Hippocratic medicine was that of a crisis, a point in picture progression of disease at which either the illness would on to triumph and the patient would succumb to death, healthier the opposite would occur and natural processes would make picture patient recover. After a crisis, a relapse might follow, celebrated then another deciding crisis. According to this doctrine, crises replica to occur on critical days, which were supposed to promote to a fixed time after the contraction of a disease. Theorize a crisis occurred on a day far from a critical day, a relapse might be expected. Galen believed that that idea originated with Hippocrates, though it is possible that go with predated him.[26]
Hippocratic medicine was humble and passive. The therapeutic mode was based on "the healing power of nature" (Latin: vis medicatrix naturae). According to this doctrine, the body contains in itself the power to re-balance the four humours and repair itself (physis).[27] Hippocratic therapy focused on simply easing this usual process. To this end, Hippocrates believed "rest and immobilization [were] of capital importance".[28] In general, the Hippocratic medicine was set free kind to the patient; treatment was gentle, and emphasized holding the patient clean and sterile. For example, only clean spa water or wine were ever used on wounds, though "dry" management was preferable. Soothing balms were sometimes employed.[29]
Hippocrates was reluctant close administer drugs and engage in specialized treatment that might renovate to be wrongly chosen; generalized therapy followed a generalized diagnosis.[29][30] Some of the generalized treatments he prescribed are fasting tell off the consumption of a mix of honey and vinegar. Hippocrates once said that "to eat when you are sick, bash to feed your sickness". However, potent drugs were used appraisal certain occasions.[31] This passive approach was very successful in treating relatively simple ailments such as broken bones, which required pastime to stretch the skeletal system and relieve pressure on rendering injured area. The Hippocratic bench and other devices were motivated to this end.[32]
In Hippocrates's time it was thought that feverishness was a disease in and of itself.[33] Hippocrates treated patients with fever by starving them out,[34] believing that 'starving' depiction fever was a way to neutralize the disease.[35] He haw therefore have been the originator of the idea "Feed a cold, starve a fever".[36]
One of the strengths of Hippocratic prescription was its emphasis on prognosis. At Hippocrates's time, medicinal psychoanalysis was quite immature, and often the best thing that physicians could do was to evaluate an illness and predict corruption likely progression based upon data collected in detailed case histories.[18][37]
Hippocratic medicine was notable for its strict professionalism, discipline, and true practice.[39] The Hippocratic work On the Physician recommends that physicians always be well-kempt, honest, calm, understanding, and serious. The Hippocratic physician paid careful attention to all aspects of his practice: he followed detailed specifications for "lighting, personnel, instruments, positioning forestall the patient, and techniques of bandaging and splinting" in representation ancient operating room.[40] He even kept his fingernails to a precise length.[41]
The Hippocratic school gave importance to the clinical doctrines of observation and documentation. These doctrines dictate that physicians classify their findings and their medicinal methods in a very compelling and objective manner, so that these records may be passed down and employed by other physicians.[11] Hippocrates made careful, accustomed note of many symptoms including complexion, pulse, fever, pains, shift, and excretions.[37] He is said to have measured a patient's pulse when taking a case history to discover whether depiction patient was lying.[42] Hippocrates extended clinical observations into family depiction and environment.[43] "To him medicine owes the art of clinical inspection and observation."[18]
Hippocrates and his followers were the first to describe many diseases and medical conditions.[44] Agreed is given credit for the first description of clubbing albatross the fingers, an important diagnostic sign in chronic lung complaint, lung cancer and cyanotic heart disease. For this reason, clubbed fingers are sometimes referred to as "Hippocratic fingers".[45] Hippocrates was also the first physician to describe Hippocratic face in Prognosis. Shakespeare famously alludes to this description when writing of Falstaff's death in Act II, Scene iii. of Henry V.[46][47]
Hippocrates began to categorize illnesses as acute, chronic, endemic and epidemic, focus on use terms such as, "exacerbation, relapse, resolution, crisis, paroxysm, mountain top, and convalescence."[37][48] Another of Hippocrates's major contributions may be line in his descriptions of the symptomatology, physical findings, surgical direction and prognosis of thoracic empyema, i.e. suppuration of the covering of the chest cavity. His teachings remain relevant to present-day students of pulmonary medicine and surgery.[49] Hippocrates was the foremost documented chest surgeon and his findings and techniques, while original, such as the use of lead pipes to drain coffer wall abscess, are still valid.[49]
The Hippocratic school of medicine described well the ailments of the human rectum and the direction thereof, despite the school's poor theory of medicine. Hemorrhoids, energy instance, though believed to be caused by an excess interpret bile and phlegm, were treated by Hippocratic physicians in somewhat advanced ways.[50][51]Cautery and excision are described in the Hippocratic Principal, in addition to the preferred methods: ligating the hemorrhoids dispatch drying them with a hot iron. Other treatments such introduction applying various salves are suggested as well.[52][53] Today, "treatment [for hemorrhoids] still includes burning, strangling, and excising."[50] Also, some penalty the fundamental concepts of proctoscopy outlined in the Corpus trim still in use.[50][51] For example, the uses of the rectal speculum, a common medical device, are discussed in the Hippocratic Corpus.[51] This constitutes the earliest recorded reference to endoscopy.[54][55] Hippocrates often used lifestyle modifications such as diet and exercise stick to treat diseases such as diabetes, what is today called daily life medicine.
Two popular but likely misquoted attributions to Hippocrates clutter "Let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food" and "Walking is man's best medicine".[56] Both appear to possibility misquotations, and their exact origins remain unknown.[57][58]
In 2017, researchers claimed that, while conducting restorations on the Saint Catherine's Monastery make out South Sinai, they found a manuscript which contains a medicinal recipe of Hippocrates. The manuscript also contains three recipes strip off pictures of herbs that were created by an anonymous scribe.[59]
Main article: Hippocratic Corpus
The Hippocratic Corpus (Latin: Corpus Hippocraticum) give something the onceover a collection of around seventy early medical works collected get a move on Alexandrian Greece.[60] It is written in Ionic Greek. The methodically of whether Hippocrates himself was the author of any attention the treatises in the corpus has not been conclusively answered,[61] but modern debate revolves around only a few of depiction treatises seen as potentially authored by him. Because of interpretation variety of subjects, writing styles and apparent date of building, the Hippocratic Corpus could not have been written by of a nature person (Ermerins numbers the authors at nineteen).[31] The corpus came to be known by his name because of his fame; possibly all medical works were classified under 'Hippocrates' by a librarian in Alexandria.[12][40][62] The volumes were probably produced by his students and followers.[63]
The Hippocratic Corpus contains textbooks, lectures, research, film and philosophical essays on various subjects in medicine, in no particular order.[61][64] These works were written for different audiences, both specialists and laymen, and were sometimes written from opposing viewpoints; significant contradictions can be found between works in the Corpus.[65] Among the treatises of the Corpus are The Hippocratic Oath; The Book of Prognostics; On Regimen in Acute Diseases; Aphorisms; On Airs, Waters and Places; Instruments of Reduction; On Rendering Sacred Disease; etc.[31]
Main article: Hippocratic Oath
The Hippocratic Oath, a seminal document on the ethics of medical practice, was attributed to Hippocrates in antiquity although new information shows it can have been written after his death. This is probably say publicly most famous document of the Hippocratic Corpus. Recently, the genuineness of the document's author has come under scrutiny. While say publicly Oath is rarely used in its original form today, scheduled serves as a foundation for other, similar oaths and laws that define good medical practice and morals.[66] Such derivatives instructions regularly taken by modern medical graduates about to enter health check practice.[12][67][68]
Although Hippocrates neither founded the school of medicine named funds him, nor wrote most of the treatises attributed to him, he is traditionally regarded as the "Father of Medicine".[69] His contributions revolutionized the practice of medicine; but after his fixate the advancement stalled.[70] So revered was Hippocrates that his teachings were largely taken as too great to be improved operate and no significant advancements of his methods were made make known a long time.[12][28] The centuries after Hippocrates's death were flecked as much by retrograde movement as by further advancement. Supporter instance, "after the Hippocratic period, the practice of taking clinical case-histories died out," according to Fielding Garrison.[71]
After Hippocrates, another best physician was Galen, a Greek who lived from AD 129 to AD 200. Galen perpetuated the tradition of Hippocratic antidote, making some advancements, but also some regressions.[72][73] In the Mean Ages, the Islamic world adopted Hippocratic methods and developed in mint condition medical technologies.[74] After the European Renaissance, Hippocratic methods were animated in western Europe and even further expanded in the Ordinal century. Notable among those who employed Hippocrates's rigorous clinical techniques were Thomas Sydenham, William Heberden, Jean-Martin Charcot and William Osler. Henri Huchard, a French physician, said that these revivals look up "the whole history of internal medicine."[75]
According to Aristotle's authentication, Hippocrates was known as "The Great Hippocrates".[76] Concerning his temper, Hippocrates was first portrayed as a "kind, dignified, old state doctor" and later as "stern and forbidding".[12] He is sure considered wise, of very great intellect and especially as exceedingly practical. Francis Adams describes him as "strictly the physician blame experience and common sense."[19]
His image as the wise, old stretch is reinforced by busts of him, which wear large beards on a wrinkled face. Many physicians of the time wore their hair in the style of Jove and Asklepius. Consequently, the busts of Hippocrates that have been found could assign only altered versions of portraits of these deities.[70] Hippocrates presentday the beliefs that he embodied are considered medical ideals. Author Garrison, an authority on medical history, stated, "He is, depose all, the exemplar of that flexible, critical, well-poised attitude racket mind, ever on the lookout for sources of error, which is the very essence of the scientific spirit."[75] "His famous person. stands for all time as that of the ideal physician," according to A Short History of Medicine, inspiring the aesculapian profession since his death.[77]
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville reports (incorrectly) that Hippocrates was the ruler of the islands slate "Kos and Lango" [sic], and recounts a legend about Hippocrates's daughter. She was transformed into a hundred-foot long dragon toddler the goddess Diana, and is the "lady of the manor" of an old castle. She emerges three times a twelvemonth, and will be turned back into a woman if a knight kisses her, making the knight into her consort submit ruler of the islands. Various knights try, but flee when they see the hideous dragon; they die soon thereafter. That is a version of the legend of Melusine.[78]
Some clinical symptoms and signs have been named after Hippocrates as he admiration believed to be the first person to describe them. Hippocratic face is the change produced in the countenance by dying, or long sickness, excessive evacuations, excessive hunger, and the poverty. Clubbing, a deformity of the fingers and fingernails, is too known as Hippocratic fingers. Hippocratic succussion is the internal splattering noise of hydropneumothorax or pyopneumothorax. Hippocratic bench (a device which uses tension to aid in setting bones) and Hippocratic cap-shaped bandage are two devices named after Hippocrates.[79]Hippocratic Corpus and Hippocratic Oath are also his namesakes. Risus sardonicus, a sustained spasming of the face muscles may also be termed the Hippocratic Smile. The most severe form of hair loss and depilation is called the Hippocratic form.[80]
In the modern age, a lunar crater has been named Hippocrates. The Hippocratic Museum, a museum on the Greek island of Kos is dedicated to him. The Hippocrates Project is a program of the New Dynasty University Medical Center to enhance education through use of discipline. Project Hippocrates (an acronym of "High Performance Computing for Robot-Assisted Surgery") is an effort of the Carnegie Mellon School be more or less Computer Science and Shadyside Medical Center, "to develop advanced orchestrate, simulation, and execution technologies for the next generation of computer-assisted surgical robots."[81] Both the Canadian Hippocratic Registry and American Hippocratic Registry are organizations of physicians who uphold the principles earthly the original Hippocratic Oath as inviolable through changing social era.
Hippocrates's legendary genealogy traces his paternal heritage directly to Asklepius and his maternal ancestry to Heracles.[31] According to Tzetzes's Chiliades, the ahnentafel of Hippocrates II is:[82]
1. Hippocrates II.
2. Heraclides
4. Hippocrates I.
8. Gnosidicus
16. Nebrus
32. Sostratus III.
64. Theodorus II.
128. Sostratus, II.
256. Thedorus
512. Cleomyttades
1024. Crisamis
2048. Dardanus
4096. Sostratus
8192. Hippolochus
16384. Podalirius
32768. Asklepius