He wrote many arguments and reports about diseases, and his recommended treatments have formed the foundation of medical practices today. The ancient Greeks placed a strong emphasis on numbers because they thought that specific numbers had meanings.
Greek people had enough money to give them the freedom to enjoy entertainment, culture, and impressive architecture in their buildings. Greeks were also very interested in the sciences and mathematics, and they wanted to understand these concepts.
As philosophers considered matter and elements, Greek doctors began to delve into the possibility that medicine and religion were not intricately connected, as the Egyptians believed they were. Instead of focusing on repelling evil spirits to heal the sick, doctors began looking at physical cures to help their patients. Ancient Greek doctors performed some surgical procedures on patients. A doctor might set a broken bone, amputate an arm or a leg, drain fluid from the lungs, or perform a procedure known as bloodletting.
Bloodletting involved the draining of blood from a patient; doctors thought that having too much blood contributed to illness. Ancient surgeries were often performed as a result of war as doctors tried to save the lives of those involved in battles.
Hippocrates was a Greek doctor who made many contributions to medicine. He founded the first school of medicine, which was the first place where medicine was separated from philosophy and religion. Instead of believing that illness happened as a punishment from the gods, Hippocrates suggested that people got sick because of how or where they lived. Differences due to age, gender, emotions and disposition could be attributed to the interactions of the humors, according to the NIH exhibition.
Heat stimulated action; cold depressed it. Someone with a choleric disposition was courageous, but phlegm caused cowardice. Youth was hot and moist; age was cold and dry. According to the ancient theory, the key to good health was to keep the humors in balance; an excess or deficiency in one or more of the humors was associated with disease.
Food was one of the most important ways to help balance the ratio of these humors. In fact, one of Hippocrates' most famous quotes is, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
Although these practices and the concept of the four humors may sound strange and unscientific today, these ideas represented the first step away from the predominantly supernatural view of sickness and a step toward a new idea that illness is related to the environment and what is going on inside the body. The Hippocratic Corpus, which is widely considered the oldest set of medical documents, is a collection of about 60 texts, or "books," containing lectures, textbooks, research, cases and philosophical essays on a variety of medicine-related subjects.
Some of the writings are short, like only a paragraph, while others run several volumes, according to Faulkner. The styles differ widely throughout the collection, supporting the idea that it had several authors.
Historians think the texts may be the work of numerous physicians practicing medicine during Hippocrates' lifetime and later, according to Biography. The corpus was ultimately assembled in Alexandria, Egypt, during the third century B.
In contrast to the writing of poetry, written prose develops slowly in the Greek world; medical writers, historians, and writers of political and judicial speeches seize upon it at approximately the same moment, and in their hands written prose rapidly gains sophistication. The figure of a concerned and conscientious physician attracted not only a host of apocryphal legends about his great deeds, but also the heterogeneous collection of early medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus.
These treatises collected under Hippocrates' name in Hellenistic times, certainly in Alexandria by the middle of the third century B. Ancient scholar-physicians who worked on the treatises as glossators and commentators were bothered by their heterogeneity of styles and their contradictory contents, and they borrowed methods current in Homeric criticism to explain them.
Some suggested that Hippocrates' life was prodigiously long perhaps years! The "best" treatises were judged to be compositions from the hand of "The Great Hippocrates, Father of Medicine" at the height of his intellectual powers. Galen , practicing medicine at Rome in the latter half of the second century A. The son, Galen supposes, misunderstood his father's intentions, and although the lad expanded what he found, what he published remained, in Galen's view, "unfinished works-in-progress.
Contradictions of fact also bothered subsequent readers, and the earliest extant references to the Hippocratic Oath, from the first century A.
Neither Scribonius Largus nor Soranus is worried about the historical and scholarly issues regarding Hippocrates, but they do wonder about what the oath prescribes for their own practice of medicine in Rome of the Principate. Each decides that he can summon Hippocrates as authority on the use of abortives.
Scribonius Largus does so to prohibit all abortions, citing another Hippocratic principle, namely that medicine is the art of healing, not harming. As the founder of the Hippocratic School of Medicine, he made major contributions to medicine that persist today. The teaching at his school revolutionized medicine and established it as a profession and a discipline in its own right. Until then, medicine had been a part of philosophy and the practice of rituals, incantations, and the casting off of evil spirits.
These early medical practitioners promoted the systematic study of clinical medicine. This means they studied diseases by directly examining the living person. Nowadays, the Hippocratic oath is a vow that doctors and other health professionals take when they qualify.
They swear to practice medicine ethically and honestly. Hippocrates, and those from his school of medicine, were the first people to describe and properly document several diseases and disorders, including a detailed description of clubbing of the fingers.
Clubbing of the fingers is a hallmark sign of chronic suppurative lung disease, cyanotic heart disease , and lung cancer. If an individual had the following signs and they were not making any improvements, the doctor might suspect that they were close to death:. Other words that came from ancient Greek and persist in modern medical usage include:.
Two famous Greek philosophers, Aristotle — B. This thinking spread and influenced Greek doctors. It allowed the Greeks to start finding out about the inside of the human body in a systematic way.
At Alexandria in Egypt, scholars starting dissecting dead bodies and studying them. Sometimes, they would cut open the bodies of criminals who were still alive. This kind of research led to the following conclusions:. Thucydides, who lived around — B. As time moved on, Greek medical professionals and scholars increasingly sought entirely natural theories for the cause of diseases.
Greek doctors used diagnostic methods that were not very different from those in use today. Many of their natural remedies were similar to some current home remedies.
Greek doctors would carry out clinical observations. They would perform a thorough physical examination. Their Hippocratic books gave guidance on how to do the examination and which diseases to consider or rule out. As magic and incantations gave way to a search for natural causes, people also started looking for natural cures.
Greek doctors became expert herbalists and prescribers of natural remedies. They believed that nature rather than superstition was the best healer. Pain in the side : Dip a large soft sponge in water and apply gently. If the pain reaches the collarbone, the doctor should draw off blood near the elbow until the blood flows bright red. Pneumonia : A bath will relieve pain and help to bring up phlegm. The patient must remain completely still in the bath. By trying to balance the four humors when their patients were ill, doctors would sometimes get things right, even if they did it for the wrong reasons.
If a person swallows something toxic, it is sometimes a good idea to cause them to vomit.
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