ABSTRACT
Ancient Greek medicine achieved its zenith in the figure of Hippocrates (ca. 460-377 BC). This physician, native to the isle of Kos, is seen as the father of Western medicine (Fig. 3.1). The Hippocratic Oath, the foundational pledge of medical ethics that binds physicians to the ethical and standardized care of their patient, is still pledged by newly inaugurated doctors worldwide. Rational thoughts, based on Hippocrates’ own observations and experiences, formed the cornerstone of his medical manifesto. He operated on the basis of humoral pathology in which four temperaments were distinguished and coupled to four types of bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black gall and white gall. If a person fell ill, it indicated an imbalance of the humours, and the task of medicine was to restore this disrupted balance through, most commonly, a change in diet and lifestyle. Hippocrates’ anatomical knowledge was sparse, and limited to what he could observe in the dissection of animals.
