ABSTRACT
In the years after the First World War several commentators began to detect a revival of medical interest in Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine. Hippocrates was invoked as the inspiration for constitutional, social, physical and psychological medicine, as well as homoeopathy and neo-humoralism.1
While some traced the roots of this revival to the late nineteenth-century,2 most accepted that it had gained particular impetus after the First World War, and the Italian historian Arturo Castiglioni claims to have coined the term neoHippocratism in 1925 to describe this interest.3 Whatever the truth of such a claim, the label became increasingly popular in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s and the growing interest in Hippocrates was often portrayed as a broader reaction against certain aspects of nineteenth-century medicine. It was a ‘revolt against the system, formalism, academics, professionalism, materialism, and analysis of the nineteenth century’, as one physician put it in 19324 – a ‘revolt in favour of vitalism, humanism, individualism, and synthesis, a return to [the] Hippocratic doctrine’.
