THE name of Hippocrates is known to every cultivated man and woman, but whether many, even among the educated physicians, know more than the name is extremely doubtful. It becomes, however, necessary in our days to go deep into the life and teaching of that great physician, because by one of those happenings which show that humanity does not develop along a straight line but in a spiral, we are getting back in modern medicine to the principles on which the teaching and practice of Hippocrates were based. In fact, the modern period of medicine, the period which started after the Great War, has been called by many historians the period of neo-Hippocratism.
Hippocrates is the great representative of Greek medicine during the great Greek centuries the seventh, sixth, fifth and fourth before Christ. Like all intellectual giants, he assimilated the thought and teaching of his contemporaries and predecessors, and constructed out of all this material a wonderful synthetic system.
Pilologists of the grammarian type are trying in vain to show which works in the Hippocratic collection can be ascribed to Hippocrates himself and which to others. It is not the text, it is the synthetic living idea that marks the Hippocratic collection. We are reminded, during these philological quarrels, of the remark of a wit made during a discussion as to whether Homer wrote the Odyssey : “No,” he said, “it was not Homer but someone else of the same name.” All these narrow-minded philological quarrels have hampered the study of Hippocratic thought by focusing attention on the grammatical peculiarities of the Hippocratic manuscripts.
It is a matter of absolute indifference to use physicians whether the great Hippocrates himself wrote the texts attributed to him or whether they are bad copies, transcriptions or the notes of pupils; grammarians may find differences in words, but physicians discover the wonderful unity of thought.
The same thing about his life. Biographers of to-day say about someone that we know nothing of his life if they have not managed to read a church register or to decipher some love-letters. Much of Hippocrates life is in fact known because the various facts found scattered in the works of the Greek historians, even if they are not based on diaries or newspapers of the period but on what is called tradition, are sufficient to show the remarkable unity of life of the greatest of all physicians.
Hippocrates was born in n460 B.C., in the Island of Cos. He belonged to a great family of physicians, belonging to the medical guild of the Asklepiads, as they were called. These Asklepiads must not be confused with the priests of Asklepios. I have shown in a previous publication that in ancient Greece religious and scientific medicine developed in parallel without mutual interference. The priest of Asklepios were Greek citizens, realists and rationalists, and they knew that they could help the sick by stimulating their religious feelings.
They knew also, however, that diseases were natural phenomena and that their cure had to be effected by the study of natural laws. They did not interfere with the physicians who studied those natural laws but on the contrary, gave them the opportunity of studying the patients who came to the temples of the God of Medicine for cure. It is for this reason that medical schools were established near the sanctuaries of the God of Medicine.
When he was very young, Hippocrates went to Egypt to study in the temples. The Egyptian spirit was essentially different from the Greek spirit. The Egyptians, like all the Mediterranean peoples, considered that disease was due to supernatural intervention, and there was much magic in their treatment of it. The Greeks, the first Nordics, brought with them rationalism.
For them disease was due to natural laws and there was no need to take into consideration any supernatural intervention. The Greeks, however, went to Egypt to study, because they knew that they could not banish from life the supernatural element, and much of the religious feeling that we find in the works of Hippocrates, as in those of so many other Greek scientists, originated in their study in the Egyptian temples.
It is probable that Hippocrates finished his studies when he was barely 22 years old and started practice in Cos. Greek physicians were at that time wanderers; they did not stay in one place but went everywhere so as to observe other people, other conditions of life, and to bring to them help and sympathy.
We find him at Larissa when he was about 31, and then, according to tradition, he was at Athens during the plague. Many dispute this fact because the historian Thucydides makes no mention of him, but it must not be forgotten that Hippocrates at that time was barely 32 and therefore was not well known. Fifth-century Greece had many intellectual giants to attract the attention of historians.
In that superabundance of genius a young man, even though highly talented, could not be much in evidence. The legend of his refusing the presents of Artaxerxes sent to him to induce him to go to Persia because he wanted to fight the plague in his own country may not refer to Athens but it certainly shows that this famous physician was sought of course at a later date in a foreign country and that he preferred to exercise his high calling in his own land since there he was needed.
It is unnecessary to follow Hippocrates through his rich and active life, to speak of his cure of Perdiccas, King of Macedon, the grandfather of Alexander the Great, of his consultation with the great physician and philosopher Democritus. A great traveller, like all the Greeks,he wanted to see new things and to extend his knowledge we find him wandering everywhere. At the age of 60 he was back in Cos again, probably at the head of the great medical school of that island and it is during one of his Journeys that he died at Larissa, probably after the age of 90. A great life, a great work.
At Cos in the famous school of medicine and during his travels Hippocrates taught the great system of medicine which remains the basis of medical thought and practice for every healer. Let us describe it in broad outline, because it is that system which is coming into the foreground to-day.
