History of Medicine and Bioethics: When Doctors Refused to Wash Their Hands
From Hippocrates and Ibn Sina to germ theory, vaccines and the rules that now protect patients, a tour of how medicine learned what it knows and what it owes.
Try 3 questions
1. 'First, do no harm' is often quoted as a line from the Hippocratic Oath. Is it?
- Yes, it is the oath's opening line
- Yes, it is the oath's closing line
- No, that exact phrase came much later
Show the answer
Answer: No, that exact phrase came much later
The Latin maxim primum non nocere is not in the oath; a similar idea, 'to help, or at least do no harm', appears in another Hippocratic text, Epidemics.
2. Under the ancient theory of the four humors, why did physicians practice bloodletting?
- To remove germs circulating in the blood
- To lower dangerously high blood pressure
- To restore balance by draining an excess humor
Show the answer
Answer: To restore balance by draining an excess humor
Illness was seen as an imbalance among blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, so removing blood was meant to correct a supposed excess; germs and blood pressure were unknown concepts.
3. What was the most lasting idea of the Hippocratic writers of ancient Greece?
- Diseases have natural, not divine, causes
- The heart, not the brain, is where we think
- Blood flows around the body in a closed loop
Show the answer
Answer: Diseases have natural, not divine, causes
Hippocratic texts such as On the Sacred Disease argued that even epilepsy had natural causes, shifting medicine from temple ritual toward observation.
The whole quiz comes before your apps
BrainTok asks a few questions like these before the apps you choose open, so your screen time turns into learning. For iPhone.
Join the beta