History of Medicine and Bioethics: Hippocratic and Galenic medicine — Hippocratic Medicine and the Four Humors
How the Hippocratic physicians explained disease by natural causes and the balance of four humors, and what that view got right and wrong.
Try 3 questions
1. What was the most important break the Hippocratic physicians made with earlier ideas about illness?
- Using surgery instead of medicines
- Basing treatment on human dissection
- Explaining disease by natural causes
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Answer: Explaining disease by natural causes
They treated illness as a natural process with physical causes such as diet, climate and imbalance, not as divine punishment.
2. The Hippocratic text "On the Sacred Disease" argues what about epilepsy?
- It has a natural cause like other diseases
- It is incurable and contagious
- It is caused by angry gods
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Answer: It has a natural cause like other diseases
The author says epilepsy is no more divine than any other illness; calling it sacred only hides ignorance of its cause.
3. Who wrote the Hippocratic Corpus, the collection of about sixty medical texts?
- Many authors over several generations
- Hippocrates alone, late in his life
- Galen, under Hippocrates' name
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Answer: Many authors over several generations
The texts differ in style and even contradict each other; scholars attribute them to many physicians, and few if any can be tied to Hippocrates himself.
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