The Hippocratic Corpus

Almost nothing is known about Hippocrates himself. The National Library of Medicine's history of Greek medicine notes that there were probably several physicians of that name, all teachers at the medical school on the island of Cos, and that the name rose to fame in the 5th century BCE. The roughly 60 works that carry it, known as the Hippocratic Corpus, were written by several authors, probably over several centuries, and different treatises often give contradictory advice. They cover diagnosis, epidemics, obstetrics, children's illnesses, nutrition and surgery.

Their authors worked among people who called on the healing god Asclepius in prayers and temple ceremonies. The Hippocratic physicians put diet, useful drugs and the balance of the body at the center instead. One treatise, On the Sacred Disease, makes that break explicit for epilepsy. Its author scorns the healers who blamed a different god for each sign, Poseidon when the patient cried out like a horse and Ares when he foamed at the mouth and kicked, and who treated the disease with purifications and incantations. The disease, he wrote, is no more divine than any other and has a natural cause; people call it sacred out of ignorance and wonder. He placed its seat in the brain.

A second treatise, Airs, Waters, and Places, opens by telling anyone who wishes to investigate medicine properly where to begin. A physician arriving in an unfamiliar town should study the seasons and winds, how the town faces the sun, whether its water is marshy and soft or hard and drawn from high rocky ground, whether the land is wooded or bare, and whether the people eat and drink to excess or prefer exercise and work.

Galen later took up the Hippocratic theory of the humors. Most Greek medical works were lost to Western Europe after the fall of Rome, survived in Arabic translations, and came back to Europe largely through Italy in the 15th century. The first collected edition of Hippocrates in Greek came from the Aldine press in Venice in 1526, eleven years after the death of its founder, Aldus Manutius.