On Ancient Medicine

The treatise On Ancient Medicine is perhaps the most intriguing and compelling work of the Hippocratic Corpus. The Corpus itself is a collection of about sixty writings covering all areas of medical thought and practice. Traditionally associated with Hippocrates, (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) the father of Western medicine, philological evidence now suggests that it was written over a period of several centuries and stylistically seems to indicate that it was the product of many authors dating from about 450–400 B.C. Hippocrates Hippocrates was born circa 460 BCE on the island of Cos in Greece. Hippocrates was looked at as a teacher and physician. His name is in around sixty medical articles, most of these medical articles were not written by him. He is admired for his high standards of moral conduct in the practice of medicine, especially for the Hippocratic Oath, which was also written by someone else. Hippocrates later dies circa 375 BCE in Larissa, Thessaly. Hippocratic Corpus: structure On the basis of its diverse arguments regarding the nature of medical therapeutics, the Hippocratic Corpus could be divided into four divisions or groups. Group I: The humoral theory of medicine proposed that our bodies were made up of diverse fluids, elements, or powers, that were considered to be the basic units or fundamental building blocks of all nature. Whereas, a more simplified and categorized version of this theory is usually associated with the four humors of black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile, the humoral theory as presented in Group I of the Hippocratic Corpus is never structured or schematized. Its approach to understanding the diverse cause of illnesses and their cures is empirical in nature.