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On Ancient Medicine or Tradition in Medicine is a treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical texts attributed to Hippocrates and written probably in the late 5th century BC. As with all works in the Hippocratic Corpus, authorship cannot be confirmed and is regarded as dubious by some historians of medicine. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Hippocrates: a conventionalized image in a Roman portrait bust (19th century engraving) Hippocrates of Cos (c. ... Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around nine hundred years. ... For other uses, see Hippocrates (disambiguation). ... For the chemical substances known as medicines, see medication. ...
As the title suggests, the treatise gives a reconstruction of the development of medicine, assuming that it was an outgrowth of the discovery by ancient people that health could be promoted by the consumption of certain foods prepared properly. Primitive peoples ate raw food and their health suffered greatly. Once they began to grind grain into flour and bake bread, and to boil strong foods, their longevity increased. Some people had more delicate constitutions and required milder foods; and so the art of medicine was born.
The treatise is a rhetorical attack on pre-Hippocratic medicine as it was apparently practiced by many of the author's contemporaries. He (the author was probably male, assuming it was written by a Hippocratic physician) criticized doctors who prescribed a treatment such as "hot" or "cold," "wet" or "dry," categories which sound like the four humours. No substance is any of these things, the author argues. This article does not cite its references or sources. ...
The inclusion of this work in the Hippocratic Corpus is surprising, given that it attacks the humor theory underpinning later Hippocratic and Galenic medicine. The contrast is one reason for modern skepticism about its authorship. The humor theory or humour theory was a theory of the makeup and workings of the human body adopted by ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. ... For other uses, see Galen (disambiguation). ...
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Despite their known respect for Egyptian medicine, attempts to discern any particular influence on Greek practice at this early time have not been dramatically successful because of the lack of sources and the challenge of understanding ancient medical terminology.
Hippocrates, founder of the school at Cos, was also regarded in Antiquity as the founder and developer of the concept of physis, or considering the human being as an organic whole, as he believed that the environment would influence the whole body.
The existence of the Hippocratic Oath implies that this "Hippocratic" medicine was practiced by a group of professional physicians bound (at least among themselves) by a strict ethical code.
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