Hippocrates

Hippocrates (Hippocrates), "the Great," "the Father of Medicine," famous Greek physician from the Asclepiad family of Cos, which was in charge of the sanctuary of Asclepius (Aesculapius) on the island of Cos. Within this family arose the Cos school of physicians, which overshadowed the older Italian and Cnidian schools. H. was born in 460 B.C., received his medical education under the guidance of his father Heracleides; records kept in the Asclepeion archives gave him great material for independent work. Biographies of H. (all of later times) are full of legends and do not withstand criticism. Among contemporaries, Plato mentions H. as a famous physician who taught medicine and had an independent scientific-philosophical approach to the analysis of phenomena (dialogues "Protagoras" and "Phaedrus"); Aristotle calls him great. H. died near Larissa in Thessaly, where for a long time his grave was shown. The year of death is not clarified (according to some data he died in 356 B.C. at 104 years old, according to others - in 375 B.C., i.e. at 85 years old). His students were: sons Thessalus and Draco, son-in-law Dolib; Apollonius, Dexippus and Praxeagorus of Cos, all famous physicians. What has come down to us under the name of works by H. is a collection of 59 works by various authors, brought together by scholars of the Alexandrian library about 150 years after the death of H. (corpus Hippocraticum). Many works differ significantly from each other in language, character, direction and even belong to different schools; to identify the authentic H. among them is a very difficult task, which ancient physicians (among others Galen) worked on and which has not been resolved to this day. The collection of H. quite fully reflects the state of medical knowledge during the period of ideological flourishing of Greece (5th and 4th centuries B.C.); it presents all departments of contemporary medicine: anatomy, physiology, general pathology, private pathology and therapy, dietetics, minor surgery with dislocations and fractures, women's and children's diseases, medical ethics and medical practice. Part of the works is simply a collection of medical notes in an unprocessed form. To H. himself are most often attributed the following works: "On Airs, Waters, and Places," "Prognostics," "Diet in Acute Diseases," "1st and 3rd Book of Epidemics," "Aphorisms," "On Joints," "Fractures," "Head Wounds." Next come works from the Cos school ("Cosic Prognostics," "Predictions," "On Ancient Medicine," "Oath," "Law," "On the Physician" and others). Along with this, there are books that clearly belong to the Cnidian school ("On Diseases," "On Internal Diseases," a number of gynecological works belonging to one author). Some works by rhetorical style should be attributed to physician-sophists and represent public lectures (e.g. "On Art"). Despite all this, the image of H. as a physician and reformer of medicine can be restored with sufficient completeness. His main merit lies in the fact that he raised Greek medicine to the highest level, laying the foundations of so-called clinical medicine. The Cnidian school, continuing the traditions of Egyptian medicine, developed in detail the doctrine of disease forms and their diagnosis and thus performed the necessary preliminary work. H. goes further and, criticizing the Cnidian school, teaches that a physician should not treat diseases according to a fixed pattern, but the patient, taking into account his individual characteristics, age, constitution, previous condition, time of year, and accordingly individualize the regimen and therapy. At the patient's bedside, the physician should be guided not by complaints, but by objective data, which he must notice down to the smallest details and on the basis of which he can conclude about the outcome of the disease (which is the most important), i.e. to make a prognosis. The basis of medicine is not natural-philosophical hypotheses about the composition of man, but medical experience, empirical regularities derived through long and careful observations (art is long, life is short). Disease is a reaction of the body to external influences, often to a change in regimen; therefore H. describes in detail the influence of climate, soil, water, food on the occurrence and course of diseases; he pays special attention to acute diseases, the regular course of which he reduces to the formation in the body of caustic, irritating substances, which first exist in a raw state, then are cooked (pepsis) and then are excreted (crisis); excretion occurs on special critical days (7th, 14th). Healing is actually performed by "natural force" (phy-sis), the physician's task is to assist it in each period of the disease; this is achieved by appropriate regimen and diet, partly by evacuant means. The surgical works of H. show that in the treatment of dislocations, fractures and wounds Greek medicine reached a significant height. The works on medical ethics are of great interest; they depict the ideal of a physician, which had great influence at all times and has not lost its significance even for our time. The significance of H. in the history of medicine is unparalleled; he continued to be read and studied even when the fame of Galen had completely faded - until the beginning of the 19th century. At times interest in him waned, but each time, when under the influence of one or another theories and one-sided rationalization medicine got into a dead end, the reaction occurred under the slogan of returning to H. From the second half of the 19th century H. has been studied only by historians and philologists (but recently in Germany interest in H. has reappeared). The works of H. were published repeatedly both in Greek and Latin and in modern European languages. The most complete collections - Oeuvres completes d'Hippocrate, traduction francaise avec le texte grec en regard, publiees par E. Littre, v. I-X, P., 1839-61; Hippokrates samtliche Werke, hrsg. v. R. Fuchs, B. I-III, Miinchen, 1898-1900. The latest editions of selected works - Hippokrates, Grundsatze seiner Schriftensammlung, hrsg. v. E. Ebstein, Insel-Bucherei № 151, Lpz. (without year); Hippokrates. eine Auslese seiner Gedanken uber den gesunden und kranken Menschen u.iber die Heilkunst, herausgegeben von A. Sack, Berlin, 1927. Hippocratici, the name of Greek physician-writers of the 4th century B.C., for the period of time from H. to the founding of the Alexandrian school by Herophilus and Erasistratus. They all deviate to a greater or lesser extent from the empirical-clinical direction of H. toward medical theory (humoral pathology or the doctrine of pneuma), as a result of which later authors called them dogmatists. They also paid great attention to anatomy. They primarily include physicians from H.'s family: sons Thessalus and Draco, son-in-law Polybius (who was the head of the school after H. and to whom, according to Aristotle, belongs the excerpt on vessels in the Hippocratic collection), grandsons - Hippocrates III and IV. In the 4th century the greatest fame was enjoyed by two physicians: 1) Diocles of Carystus, whom Galen places in significance immediately after H. Diocles lived in Athens, wrote a book on anatomical dissection, a book on digestion, in which he considered this process as fermentation and putrefaction, and a number of medical works (prognostics, pathology and therapy, a work on surgery), of which only fragments have remained. 2) Praxagorus of Cos, a student of Diocles. He was the first to draw a sharp distinction between arteries and veins, asserted that arteries are filled with air, and developed the doctrine of the pulse. Being a follower of humoral pathology, instead of 4 basic fluids he accepted 11. His student was Herophilus.