Hippocratic Corpus
The Hippocratic Corpus, or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works closely associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings. The Hippocratic Corpus covers many diverse aspects of medicine, from Hippocrates' medical theories to what he devised to be ethical means of medical practice, to addressing various illnesses. Even though it is considered a singular corpus that represents Hippocratic medicine, they vary in content, age, style, methods, and views practiced; therefore, authorship is largely unknown. The ancient commentaries on this corpus, from writers such as Attalion and Oribasius, are myriad. Hippocrates began Western society's development of medicine, through a delicate blending of the art of healing and scientific observations. What Hippocrates was sharing from within his collection of works was not only how to identify symptoms of disease and proper diagnostic practices, but more essentially, he was alluding to his personable form of art, "The art of true living and the art of fine medicine combined." The Hippocratic Corpus became the foundation upon which Western medical practice was built.
Hippocrates' contribution to medicine
was born on the Greek island of Kos. The verifiable details of his life are few, despite centuries of hagiographic accounts. According to tradition, Hippocrates was born into a hereditary order of priest-like physicians known as Asclepiads. At the time, the practice of medicine involved spiritual and supernatural elements, corresponding to the prevailing belief that health and illness were conferred by the gods. Hippocrates did not share this view. For example, according to works later ascribed to him, he was the first to describe epilepsy as an inheritable brain disease rather than an infliction from the divine. In addition to his rejection of purely divine causes of illness, Hippocrates rejected the idea that medicine could only be practiced by those born into the priestly Asclepiad class like himself. He went on to establish a medical school at Kos and opened it to those born outside of the Asclepiad class. Known as the father of medicine, Hippocrates was an admirable physician and teacher during his time. When considered among fellow ancient Greek philosophers and physicians, Hippocrates was considered the most influential in the evolution of medicine as a science. He focused on a natural approach to medicine, expressing that there had to be a comprehensive understanding of the patient's health, as well as harmony between nature and the individual.Hippocrates' focal point for medicine stemmed from the practice of scientific discipline. To enforce scientific discipline, Hippocrates based his medical principles on natural sciences, diagnosing, treating, and preventing medical diseases. In addition to a focus on natural approaches, he also began to look into anatomical and physiological relationships in the body. He also heavily believed in the study of anatomy and the nervous system. By understanding the anatomy of the human body, Hippocrates was able to recognize symptoms holistically when diagnosing a patient. To align completely with his emphasis on the physical observation of the human body, Hippocrates eliminated any religious element from his account of medicine. In the Hippocratic text On Flesh, On Regimen, On Diseases I, On Winds, relevant works from the Hippocratic Corpus, he firmly established the limited focus he planned to employ with his medical concerns, that is, he had determined that he would only entertain natural phenomena that are relevant to the medical issue at hand.
Another contribution Hippocrates had to medicine was evidence-based knowledge. Hippocrates was the first to ever establish the belief that by simply observing a patient, a physician would recognize symptoms and determine the disease. Hippocrates insisted that he must keep careful notes and follow the patient from the start of the disease to the end no matter what that might have looked like so he could compile different symptoms and treatments. The ideal of evidence-based knowledge is still implemented in the medical field and has set the standards for physicians today. According to Hippocrates, medicine was dependent on detailed observation of symptoms and health, prognosis, treatment of the patient, and reason to establish diagnosis.
While the Hippocratic Corpus was not written by Hippocrates himself, the compiled work of medical professionals all follow the same guidelines imposed by Hippocratic medicine. Hippocrates laid the foundation for modern medicine, as his protocols and guidelines for the classification of diseases are being utilized by physicians today. His principles for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases have been preserved in the Hippocratic Corpus, and are the standard for medical ethics today.
Authorship, name, origin
Of the texts in the corpus, none is proven to be by Hippocrates himself, The works of the corpus range from Hippocrates' time and school to many centuries later and rival points of view. Franz Zacharias Ermerins identifies the hands of at least nineteen authors in the Hippocratic Corpus. However, the varied works of the corpus have gone under Hippocrates' name since antiquity. According to Howard Clark Kee, it is a haphazard collection of anonymous authors.The corpus may be the remains of a library of Cos, or a collection compiled in the third century BC in Alexandria. However, the corpus includes works beyond those of the Coan school of ancient Greek medicine; works from the Cnidian school are included as well.
Only a fraction of the Hippocratic writings have survived. The lost medical literature is sometimes referred to in the surviving treatises, as at the beginning of Regimen. Some Hippocratic works are known only in translation from their original Greek to other languages; given that the quality and accuracy of a translation without a surviving original cannot be known, it is difficult to identify the author with certainty. "Hippocratic" texts survive in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin.
Dates and groupings
The majority of the works in the Hippocratic Corpus date from the Classical period, the last decades of the 5th century BC and the first half of the 4th century BC. Among the later works, The Law, On the Heart, On the Physician, and On Sevens are all Hellenistic, while Precepts and On Decorum are from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.Some of the earliest works of the corpus are connected to the Cnidian school: On Diseases II–III and the early layer within On the Diseases of Women I–II and On Sterile Women. Prorrhetics I is also mid-fifth century. In the second half of the fifth century, a single author likely produced the treatises On Airs, Waters, Places; Prognostics; Prorrhetics II; and On the Sacred Disease. Other fifth-century works include On Fleshes, Epidemics I and III, On Ancient Medicine, On Regimen in Acute Diseases, and Polybus' On the Nature of Man/''Regimen in Health.
At the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century, one author likely wrote Epidemics II–IV–VI and On the Humors. The coherent group of surgical treatises is of similar date.
The gynecological treatises On the Nature of the Woman, On the Diseases of Women, Generation, On the Nature of the Child, and On Sterile Women constitute a closely related group. identified five layers of material in this group, from the mid-fifth century to the mid-fourth century. The oldest stratum is found in On the Nature of the Woman and On the Diseases of Women II. Generation and On the Nature of the Child constitute a single work by a late-fifth-century author, who may also be identified as the author of On Diseases IV and of sections of On the Diseases of Women I. The latest layer is On Sterile Women, which was composed after the other gynecological treatises were in existence.
A single fourth-century author probably wrote On Fistulae and On Hemorrhoids''.
Author Susan Wise Bauer writes that, because it explains disease "without blaming or invoking the gods", the Corpus is "the first surviving book of science".
Content
The Hippocratic Corpus contains textbooks, lectures, research, notes and philosophical essays on various subjects in medicine, in no particular order. These works were written for different audiences, both specialists and laymen, and were sometimes written from opposing view points; significant contradictions can be found between works in the Corpus.Case histories
One significant portion of the corpus is made up of case histories. Books I and III of Epidemics contain forty-two case histories, of which 60% ended in the patient's death. Nearly all of the diseases described in the Corpus are endemic diseases: colds, consumption, pneumonia, etc.Theoretical and methodological reflections
In several texts of the corpus, the ancient physicians develop theories of illness, sometimes grappling with the methodological difficulties that lie in the way of effective and consistent diagnosis and treatment. As scholar Jacques Jouanna writes, "One of the great merits of the physicians of the Hippocratic Corpus is that they are not content to practice medicine and to commit their experience to writing, but that they have reflected on their own activity".Reason and experience
While the approaches range from empiricism to a rationalism reminiscent of the physical theories of the pre-Socratic philosophers, these two tendencies can exist side-by-side: "The close association between knowledge and experience is characteristic of the Hippocratics," despite "the Platonic attempt to drive a wedge between the two".The author of On Ancient Medicine launches immediately into a critique of opponents who posit a single "cause in all cases" of disease, "having laid down as a hypothesis for their account hot or cold or wet or dry or anything else they want". The method put forward in this treatise "could certainly be characterized as an empirical one", preferring the effects of diet as observed by the senses to cosmological speculations, and it was seized upon by Hellenistic Empiricist doctors for this reason. However, "unlike the Empiricists, the author does not claim that the doctor's knowledge is limited to what can be observed by the senses. On the contrary, he requires the doctor to have quite extensive knowledge of aspects of the human constitution that cannot be observed directly, such as the state of the patient's humors and internal organs".