Alexandra Stewart 27th October 2007
Why did the doctors follow the ideas of Hippocrates for so long?
Hippocrates was a Greek philosopher who lived from 460 BC to 377BC. All of his work involving medicine is of great significance to not only historians, but doctors too. The books written by him, or people who believed in his research, are highly important too because they are the first examples of Greek medical and what it was based upon. There were two earlier philosophers who aided Hippocrates in his work. One was Pythagoras, and he taught that a healthy body was one which was in perfect balance. Another one was Alcmaeon of Croton, who was one of Pythagoras’ pupils. He argued that a healthy body had the right balance of hot and cold, wet and dry within it. Any obvious things that were out of balance (like a high temperature) was a sign that the human was ill.
Unfortunately, historians do not know a massive amount about Hippocrates himself. He is associated with medical books, as mentioned above, and these were known as Hippocratic Corpus. We can not be certain that these books were actually written by him, but they do show us, for the first time, Greek medical thoughts. It is obvious by reading these books, that medicine had evolved more and moved on to caring for the patient as well as the illness. Hippocrates decided he did not want doctors to depend on religious cures or to rely on certain theories of the cause of disease. He wanted to advise doctors to observe the patients progress whilst curing the illness. He did not agree with religious or ‘magical’ cures. Egyptians also used this system, of observing the patient, but the Greeks developed it into clinical observation. Ideally, the doctors had to follow four steps and these were:
