ABSTRACT
The name Hippocrates, being associated with the literary remains of a flourishing school of Hellenic medicine to which Western scientific medicine traces its roots, is surely the most famous in the history of medicine. It designates a rational approach to diagnosis and healing and – perhaps most important today – it signifies the moral integrity of a profession that has a unique ethical status in the Judeo-Christian world. But in the past, Hippocrates – the supposed author of the Hippocratic treatises – was looked to as a source of medical theory as well as method, and this theory was to serve many masters. In this paper I will specifically address how Hippocrates was enlisted to support Paracelsian medicine, as Petrus Severinus expounded it in his 1571 treatise, the Idea medicinæ.1 By so doing, I will reveal that the reading and reevaluation of Hippocratic texts was implicated in the formation of Paracelsian chemical philosophy during the 1560s.
