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Hippocrates

 

            Hippocrates was a Greek physician who helped transform medicine from a field ruled by magic, religion, and superstition to a scientific discipline. Hippocrates based his medical practice on the study of the human body and on objective observations. He believed a person's well being depended on the balance of the four humors (four fluids in body that help to determine a person's character and general health)- phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood- and supported the doctrine of treating the body as a whole. His opinion that ill health should be treated not with drugs but with rest, good diet, fresh air, and exercise was progressive.
             It is believed Hippocrates was born around B.C. 460 on the Greek island of Cos, the son of Heraclides and Phenaretes. His father was a physician, and Hippocrates reportedly studied under him, as well as under the atomist Democritus and the sophist Gorgias. Plato referred to Hippocrates in some of his writings, as did Aristotle. Hippocrates seems to have traveled widely in Greece and Asia Minor throughout his career, teaching and practicing medicine. It is believed he spent considerable time teaching at the medical school at Cos.
             Dismissing the common view that illness was caused by disfavor of the gods or possession by evil spirits, Hippocrates believed that sickness had a rational, physical explanation. He treated the body as a whole rather than as a series of parts, and in his practice he gathered information about parts of the body to form an overall concept before breaking down the whole into parts. Hippocrates also embraced the commonly held belief that disease was caused by an imbalance of the four bodily humors, but he expanded on the theory and maintained that humors were glandular secretions and their imbalance was caused by outside forces.
             Hippocrates was an advocate of natural healing processes. The goal of medicine, he held, should be to avoid the conditions known to cause disease and to build the strength of the ill through proper diet, cleanliness, exercise, and rest.


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