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Hippocrates was the first to treat medicine as a science. Early Hellenic physicians were essentially surgeons or sophists dealing with external injuries, leaving the rest to the Gods. Hippocrates dissociated medicine from mythology and rituals. He brought together the loose medical knowledge in medical schools where he taught, systematizing that knowledge into his teachings and text. He, furthermore, gave physicians their highest moral inspiration.
The Hippocratic method came to entail the studied bedside manner and inductive reasoning that characterize the best internists and clinicians today. The art consisted of clinical inspection, observation, a flexible and critical mind-set, and a continuous search for a source of error. Hippocrates insisted upon a careful systematic thorough examination of the patient with consideration of facial appearance, pulse, temperature, respirations, palpation, urine, sputum, feces, pain and movement. He insisted on transparency, honesty and non-judgmental impersonal objectivity. This bedside method, distinctive of all true clinicians from Sydenham to Osler, formed the basis of scientific medicine.
Professionally, Hippocrates stressed the dignity of the physician and respect of the patient including confidentiality and trust. That simple axiom, 2450 years ago, brought honor and privilege to the medical profession for centuries to come. As such, Hippocrates remains the father of Internal medicine. His accuracy in description of disease with few changes and few additions would serve in current medical texts. Physicians continued the use of his texts -- especially on malaria and tuberculosis -- up through the 18th century. The Hippocratic method fell out of common use after Hippocrates’s death but revived in the 17th century.
Hippocrates’s aphorism on diabetes, based on tasting the patient’s urine for sugar and his treatment with a diet of red meat and sour wine struck me as amazing. Hippocrates practice and teachings were at the height of Athenian democracy. He was contemporary to Sophocles, Plato, and Socrates. Never before or since has there been so much genius in so little time and space.
Hippocrates (460-370)
Medical schools give early instruction to students in the proper manner in which to interview and examine their first patients. Textbooks stress listening skills, objectivity, and using one’s mind and senses as precision instruments of analysis. These words might very well have come from Hippocrates two thousand four hundred and fifty years ago.Hippocrates was the first to treat medicine as a science. Early Hellenic physicians were essentially surgeons or sophists dealing with external injuries, leaving the rest to the Gods. Hippocrates dissociated medicine from mythology and rituals. He brought together the loose medical knowledge in medical schools where he taught, systematizing that knowledge into his teachings and text. He, furthermore, gave physicians their highest moral inspiration.
The Hippocratic method came to entail the studied bedside manner and inductive reasoning that characterize the best internists and clinicians today. The art consisted of clinical inspection, observation, a flexible and critical mind-set, and a continuous search for a source of error. Hippocrates insisted upon a careful systematic thorough examination of the patient with consideration of facial appearance, pulse, temperature, respirations, palpation, urine, sputum, feces, pain and movement. He insisted on transparency, honesty and non-judgmental impersonal objectivity. This bedside method, distinctive of all true clinicians from Sydenham to Osler, formed the basis of scientific medicine.
Professionally, Hippocrates stressed the dignity of the physician and respect of the patient including confidentiality and trust. That simple axiom, 2450 years ago, brought honor and privilege to the medical profession for centuries to come. As such, Hippocrates remains the father of Internal medicine. His accuracy in description of disease with few changes and few additions would serve in current medical texts. Physicians continued the use of his texts -- especially on malaria and tuberculosis -- up through the 18th century. The Hippocratic method fell out of common use after Hippocrates’s death but revived in the 17th century.
Hippocrates’s aphorism on diabetes, based on tasting the patient’s urine for sugar and his treatment with a diet of red meat and sour wine struck me as amazing. Hippocrates practice and teachings were at the height of Athenian democracy. He was contemporary to Sophocles, Plato, and Socrates. Never before or since has there been so much genius in so little time and space.
