ABSTRACT
The history of medicine in ancient Greece offers an extremely complex problem because of the difficulty of distinguishing chronological periods and of indicating, at least approximately, the moment at which Hellenic medicine began to possess sufficient knowledge to constitute a particular system. Also, in the case of Greece it is more difficult to separate medicine from the rest of a culture to which it is closely connected than it is in the case of many peoples who preceded the Greeks in history. From the historical point of view the medicine of ancient Greece is but one phase of medical thought through the centuries. But this phase of development manifests in their full strength orientations which in the preceding civilization were merely budding germs. To judge properly the process of formation of Hellenic medicine, it is necessary to consider the influences to which Greece was exposed through centuries and those which Greece in its turn exerted on adjacent and distant peoples.
