Hippocrates Health Dictionary

He said: “Ill health is a disharmony between man and his environment” and “Let medicine be your food, and food your medicine”. The long list of herbs used in his practice are still popular among herbalists today. He taught that diseases were disturbances in the balance of the four humours. For centuries he was regarded as a model for doctors and it is claimed he ‘gave medicine a soul’. 

c.460 to 377 BC and who taught students at the medical school in Cos. Often called the ‘father of medicine’, he is renowned for drawing up the HIPPOCRATIC OATH, some of which may have been derived from the ancient oath of the Aesclepiads. Apart from his oath, Hippocrates has about 60 other medical works attributed to him, forming a corpus which was collected around 250 BC in the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt. Hippocratic medicine appealed ‘to reason rather than to rules or to supernatural forces’ is how the late Roy Porter, the English social historian, summed up its ethos in his medical history, The Greatest Bene?t to Mankind (Harper Collins, 1997). Porter also commended Hippocrates as being patient-centred rather than disease-orientated in his practice of medicine.