Hippocrates 400-377 B.C.

Hippocrates was the most important of the early Greek practitioners. He learned much from the Egyptians but overall, developed his own approach to medicine. This included:

• Emphasis on treating the whole patient including physical, emotional and mental states.
• Disease viewed as an upset of the ‘balance’ found in healthy individuals.
• Physicians role to help to help patient help themselves.
• Encouraging his students to look for the fluctuations in a patient’s symptoms and the changes in healthy people and to compare them.

Patients not treated the same each day but given exercises, herbs and food in rotations of 3 for 7 days. The aim of this was to restore the balance of the 4 humours: blood, bile, phlegm and choler. Observation and reasoning on the 4 humours came from the Hippocratic school. We know that Hippocrates used at least 400 herbs, many of which are still used today e.g. elder, garlic, hawthorn, henbane, juniper, thyme. Hippocrates was also credited for coining the phrase: ’let medicine be your food and food your medicine’.

The 4 Humours

Greek physicians believed they had found evidence for 4 humours in the contents of an emptied blood vessel. It was noted when blood coagulates, 4 parts are seen:

1. An upper light red layer (oxygenated red corpuscles) which was thought to be the blood humour itself.
2. Dark red coagulum (poorly oxygenated red corpuscles) called the black bile humour.
3. A clear yellow liquid (blood serum) called the yellow bile humour.
4. Yellowish-white fibrous mass (fibrin) seen if the blood was whisked before coagulation, called the phlegm humour.

The blending of the 4 humours in any one individual seen as mysterious. A healthy temperament was a good mix of elements, even if there might be a slight excess of one. There was a sense of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts and for Hippocrates, the 4 humours were a useful theory but not a binding doctrine.