Hippocrates of Cos

Hippocrates separated medicine from religion and gave it an ethical code. Born on the island of Kos around 460 BC into a family of physicians who claimed descent from Asclepius, he trained under his father, travelled widely across Greece practising and teaching, and founded a school. Almost nothing about him personally is established. Around sixty works survive under his name — the Hippocratic Corpus — written by many hands over two centuries, and which of them are his is unresolved. The decisive shift is visible in the treatise On the Sacred Disease. Epilepsy was attributed to divine possession; the author argues that it has a natural cause like every other illness, and that people call it sacred out of ignorance. That principle — that disease has physical causes and can be investigated — is the foundation of medicine as a discipline. The method was observation. The case histories in the Epidemics record patients day by day, including those who died, with a candour that later medical writing lost; they describe the facies of a dying man in terms still called the Hippocratic face. The theory was the four humours, and it was wrong, and it governed European medicine for two thousand years. The practical advice holds better: rest, diet, cleanliness, fresh air, prognosis, and the observation that the physician's task is to help nature and above all to do no harm. The Oath binds the physician to act for the patient's benefit, to refuse poison and abortion, to abstain from sexual relations with patients, and to keep confidences. He died around 370 BC.

• Lived: 460 BCE – 370 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: physician, scientist