HIPPOCRATIC MEDICINE

The Greek Medical School: its import to the Scientific Revolution

Hippocrates of Cos was born circa 470 and lived a long life, probably till 370 B.C.

SOURCES

The most important source of Greek Medicine comes from gymnasium keepers, who were very knowledgeable in treating bone fractures and luxations. Dietetics was born in Greek gyms out of the demands of the gymnasts to achieve physical fitness. Gymnastics was also applied for the recovery of certain diseases. Summing up, surgery, diet, and exercise are practically all the therapeutical resources of Hippocratic physicians.

The Hippocratic School actually sets up the beginning of science: they are the first to systematize empirical data: observation of the human body in health and ill-health. Aware that medical knowledge can only increase gradually along generations, they set up a tradition of teaching accumulated data furnished by experience.

Hippocratic doctors defend their hard-won knowledge from superstition, furthermore, they defend it eagerly from intruding philosophers, always willing to trash singularities and iron the wrinkles of experience with void abstractions or cosmological speculations.

The most striking historical finding lies on the history case collections compiled in one of the most important Hippocratic treatises. These history cases are extremely detailed: symptoms and phases of diseases are systematically recorded. The treatment entry is never missing: generally bed riddance, a diet, and finally the end of the disease, usually death.

In the treatise called 'The Sacred Disease', i.e., epilepsy, we hear the following statement: 'Methinks this ailment is not more divine than the others. It has a natural cause, the same as the others. Men believe it divine because they do not understand it. But if they called divine anything they cannot grasp, there would not be any limits for things divine'.

As we see Hippocratic doctors were immune to apriorism and superstition: they stuck to their trades. Had they not done so, their work would have rendered totally ineffectual results.

Antiqua Medicina

This is, to be sure, the most important Hippocratic treatise.

It opens with an outright attack against 'those who attempt to deal with medicine by means of deductive hypotheses'.

It goes on with a vicious attack on Empedocles's 4 elements and on those who reduce the cause of diseases and death either to the combination of the 4 elements or their qualities (heat, cold, dampness, dryness), when their experience informs them of countless substances and infinite ways of action of the said qualities.

The art of medicine is based on the criterion that the sick will not recover unless they change their food intake, add some prescription medicine, rest in bed and some measures of the sort. The dietary modifications are the result of observation and experimentation, their objective being that of fitting them to different constitutions, and different health states.

This develops a clinical corpus of knowledge that sometimes entirely cures the sick, other times it soothes their disorders, and, equally important, it can be taught and therefore set up a permanent base of data (database), constantly enriched with the passing of the generations: no ephemeral stuff like beliefs, cosmologies or theoretical speculations. (By the way, notice the importance of accumulation, of summation, of having something reliably constant, not in perpetual change, as some new-age followers would like, as they liken constancy and persistence to death).

Hippocratic Medicine, its import to the Scientific Revolution

In 1686, Jacques Massard, Grenoble Medical College's Dean and member of the Royal Academy of French Medicine writes: 'Hippocrates wrote this treatise on Ancient Medicine in order to oppose certain speculators of his time who tried to set up the cause of disorders by means of reductionistic principles such as heat, cold, dryness or humidity, when it is evident that medicine cannot do without the doctor's perceptions, his prescriptions on dietary issues and medicines, based by their place in nature and on on the grounds of imaginary hypotheses'.

The kind of hypotheses Hippocrates finds at fault are those launched with the sole purpose to be used as a base of logical deductions which more often than not do but confirm the original hypothesis. He asserts that, at least in medicine, no argument is valid until its conclusions have not been submitted to experiential proof.

Antiquity, however, soon lost track of these wise words, which were lost for almost 2000 years, until they were rediscovered by the founders of Modern Science. Bacon, for instance, devotes a whole treatise, the Novum Organum, to underscore the Hippocratic methodology.