Hippocrates of Kos, the Asklepiad

Following up on last week’s post, “Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: Gastronomic Writer, Lawyer, and Politician” today’s LinkedIn newsletter features Hippocrates, the Greek physician who systematized medical treatments, disentangling them from religion and superstitions.

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

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Much of what is known about Hippocrates of Kos is fragmented and comes from physician Soranus of Ephesus, the writings of the philosopher Aristotle, and Plato’s work Protagorus. He lived during the Age of Pericles (460-370BC), after Pythagoras; at the same time as Socrates, Plato, and Democritus. Hippocrates was still alive during Aristotle’s early life.

His father, Heraclides, was a doctor descended from an aristocratic family of medical practitioners. His mother was Phenarete, though other sources name her Praxitela.

Hippocrates was married to a woman whose name is lost to history but might have been Doriana. After his parents had died and his daughter married, he sailed from Kos to the Thessaly region of the Greek mainland, where his ancestors were born, accompanied by his sons.

One of his most important assertions was the notion that diseases and illnesses do not derive from curses from the gods nor are they rooted in any supernatural or superstitious origin.

Instead, he was first and foremost interested in finding out what led to the development of the symptoms experienced by the person. He distinguished lifestyle patterns and personal characteristics that predisposed to certain conditions.

Hippocrates is often credited with developing the theory of the "four humors," or fluids. The so-called humors were yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm.

According to the theory of the four humors:

• Yellow bile is related to the choleric disposition and the qualities of hot and dry. It is associated with fire, summer, the gallbladder and childhood.
• Black bile is related to the melancholic disposition and the qualities of cold and dry. It is associated with earth, winter, the spleen and old age.
• Blood is connected to the sanguine disposition and the qualities of hot and moist. It is linked to air, spring, the heart and adolescence.
• Phlegm is related to the phlegmatic disposition and the qualities of cold and moist. It is connected to water, the brain and maturity.

Ancient Greek schools of medicine were split into the Knidian and Koan on how to deal with disease. Some of the successes of the Hippocratic School, a Koan school, were:

• attributing diseases to natural rather than supernatural causes
• treating diseases through rational reasoning rather than magic or sacrifices to gods
• identifying that environment, diet, and lifestyle can contribute to ill-health
• emphasizing kindness, gentleness, and cleanliness in treatments
• ensuring practitioners operated in a professional way, including keeping medical records for each patient
• prognosis – detailed record-keeping for many patients enabled physicians to know the likely path an illness would take

Some of its failures were:

• a lack of understanding of human anatomy – dissections of human bodies were illegal
• the pseudoscientific practice of relating diseases and ill-health to imbalances in ‘humors’ of black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile
• an over-reliance on nature’s own healing power to cure illnesses. In the Hippocratic texts Epidemics I and Epidemcis III, of the 42 case histories reported, over half ended with the patient’s death.

Between approximately 440 and 360 BC, Hippocrates wrote a number of medical treatises. Only 60 were saved from the fire that destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria around the end of the second century AD. The surviving texts were compiled and published under the title Corpus Hippocraticum.

They cover topics including joints, therapy, regime, surgery, physiology, the progression of diseases, purging remedies, and gynecology. Issues of ethics and medicine's relation to other subjects, especially philosophy, are also discussed.

Among the works of the Corpus Hippocraticum is Airs, Waters, and Places, which, instead of ascribing diseases to divine origin, discusses their environmental causes. It proposes that considerations such as a town's weather, drinking water, and site along the paths of favorable winds can help a physician ascertain the general health of citizens. Three other works—Prognostic, Coan Prognosis, and Aphorisms—advanced the then-revolutionary idea that, by observing enough cases, a physician can predict the course of a disease.

Hippocrates died at the outskirts of Larissa in Thessaly.

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About the Author: Lawrence Jean-Louis is the founder of eBrand Me, a digital marketing agency offering marketing & consultative services to CPAs and tax professionals. She aspires to start a money management firm by 2030.