Hippocratic Corpus Summary

The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of works based off Hippocrates’s teachings. The writings include case histories, lecture notes, diet recommendations, and more (Week One Lecture). Adherents to the Hippocratic school, approach the diagnosis and treatment of illness with an individualized approach (Week One Lecture). The Hippocratic Corpus taught physicians to be interested in what people were like when they were healthy. (Week One Lecture).

Ancient Greek and Roman physicians attained knowledge about the human body through anatomical investigations through animal dissections. The information learned from this was then applied to the human body. Nerves were of a particular interest, and physicians would cut into animal spinal cords at

Women oversaw the health and well-being of their families. Slaves were used for experimental proposes. One such example is J. Marion Sims and his use of slave women such as Anarcha for obstetric research (Lecture Week 5). In addition to this, slaves provided white physicians with useful information about African medicine. For example, Cotton Mather was able to use one of his slaves information to develop the smallpox inoculation (Mather, “Major Problems” p.30). Native Americans also contributed information to white physicians and heath care workers. While European disease killed off the majority of the Native population, Native people had a rich knowledge about the healing properties of plants and medicinal botany that was shared with white people both voluntarily, and involuntarily (Calloway, “Indians, Europeans, and the New World of Disease and Healing”

Whereas the miasma theorists placed the source of sickness in bad air, and the clinical approach was symptom-driven Pasteurians believed that the disease could be isolated and cured with vaccines (Guerrini, “Microbe Hunters” p.98). Pasteurians believed in the germ theory that “became increasingly evident, as the microbial causes of several diseases were isolated” (Guerrini, “Microbe Hunters” p.103). Thanks, in part to Pasteur and the germ theory, animal use and new lab techniques became available and more microbes were