Ancient Greek Medicine Before Hippocrates Essay

Ancient Greek medicine before Hippocrates was primarily based upon superstition and spirituality, where their devotion to Asclepios (the God of medicine and healing) overpowered advancements of the scientific inquiry aspects of medicine. Initially, the Greeks during the 6th and the beginning of 5th century regarded illnesses as a form of divine punishments and healing from the gods. The knowledge based on superstitious belief hindered the understanding of medicine, given that the subjective beliefs were held in higher esteem rather than empirical observation. Hence, religion decisively played a major role during this time before Hippocrates particularly because it was the priests who were considered the primary care givers in the name of Asclepius. Although further into the 5th c. philosophers such as Hippocrates Pre-Socratic contemporaries: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Thales, and

It became the fundamental theory of the Hippocratic medicine; Hippocrates and the classical philosophers believed that health existed when these humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) were present in a harmoniously balance within the body, and when one humour was disrupted it then caused a disease. Being that these humours were of the number four and the elements-earth, air, water, and fire- were also in the number four, the corresponding qualities –dryness, cold, dampness and heat- were all in all interconnected. Hippocrates related the qualities to the environment and believed “if one of the “qualities”-dryness, cold, dampness and heat-is present in excess in the environment, this tends to produce an excess in the corresponding humor of the body, thus causing a dyscrasia and disease. By emphasizing that nature served both the health and the disease of a patient, the Hippocratic physician came to be known to reject superstition, divination and magic; according to