Hippocrates improved the way of Greek medicine, for a starter he didn’t believed that a God would cause illness so therefore he must find a reason to back this up and he did. He found out the foundations of everything to do with medicine. He managed to find out that there is a link between scientific problems with the problems of medicine and when the two were placed together a lot of extra answers were found out. Although some of the things that he came up with weren’t necessarily right they still made improvements and changed the medicine was used. Once believing that a God didn’t cause illness, he came up with the four humours about the body. The Hippocrates believed that the world and everything in it had to be made up of some sort of structure and that structure was the elements, water air fire and earth. He managed to like these four elements to the body illnesses seasons and what there qualities were, the humours for water was phlegm, air was blood, fire was yellow bile and earth black bile. He would say that if the four humours were in balance then you are healthy and that you are not ill, the way that he would say you are ill is if that your humours unbalanced and he would know this because your would be vomiting or sweating and you would only be doing this because you have got to much of one of the humours so you are getting rid of it, this was the explanation for somebody to be acting abnormal. Another reason in why the Hippocrates improved Greek medicine was because observed everything that they did, if they gave somebody some treatment it would be written down and kept in that persons files. The patient would be asked at intervals at what the doctor would say and he would answer questions such as, has the pain gone worse or bad do you feel more relaxed, and the answers would be kept and filed. As well as asking the patient questions they would inspect things such as there temperature and urine or listening the there breathing, after all this has been done after a couple of days they would look back on the history of the patient and offer advice so sort there problems out and say whether they can eat or not and what they can eat too. Many advice given was the same such if you have Pneumonia you should take a bath, then other things such as take long walks before meals, have a good diet or make yourself sick. Then if you had more serious illness they use amputation only as a last resort, or draining the lungs for pneumonia, this operation was most of the time successful.
Galen thought of many more things than what the Hippocrates thought of yet he still used most of the Hippocrates theories. He wrote everything down that he did and also wrote books over his theories too, writing over 250 books explaining symptoms of illness and the cures to be given for the illnesses. He also said that there was only one God responsible for the human body, therefore many people accepted him because the Christian and Islam church allowed him too, making this possible. This making a big difference on peoples lives especially the Christian faith therefore they would not let Galen be criticised. So people believed his work was always right and they never said a bad word against it and did what he said and thought was right. He made everybody give a professional approach towards medicine and made it a big deal and made sure everybody knew it mattered, doing this made the people think that he was always right and never wrong so whatever he said they must take his word for. People thought so much that he was right, they never bothered to do any more atomic investigations because they thought there was no need to, but after a while they were also banned as well. Throughout the work that Galen produced he did make many theories about things, but not all of them were always right such as he thought that the heart controlled the speech and not the brain, or when he tested out new operations or drugs he got them wrong to because he thought that some animals were the same as humans when they weren’t. Despite that Galen improved medicine a little more.
In a conclusion I think that the Hippocrates made of a significant improvement in medicine because they came up with the ideas of the four humours and writing down everything that has been done, or making books on illnesses and how to solve them giving advice too. He sorted out the problem that everybody thought that Gods were to blame for people being ill which wasn’t true because people don’t get ill by a God it is to do with the state that you are in. Galen did also make an improvement on medicine but not as much as the Hippocrates, Galen copied many of there ideas and didn’t really solve any problems himself. Galen made a big mistake in which he couldn’t be criticised because not everything is perfect, in some way everything can get a little better but he stopped everyone form making any improvement, and this led to the improvement of medicine coming to a halt, because know body was allowed to make improvements on it because know body was allowed to question the work of Galen. Overall I thought that the Hippocrates made better improvement in medicine than Galen.
Asclepia’s was the god of healing