Hippocrates Moves Illness From the Gods to the Body
A Greek physician, a library of some sixty texts he may not have written, and the theory of the four humors
Quick facts
- Life
- c. 460-370 BCE, born on Kos
- Corpus size
- About sixty works
- Four humors
- Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile
- Authorship
- Attributed to Hippocrates; scholars find multiple authors
What happened
Hippocrates was born on the Greek island of Kos in the 5th century BCE and became the most famous physician of antiquity. Historians credit him with turning medicine away from the supernatural and religious framework tied to the healing god Asclepius, toward observation, classification, and the tracing of causes and effects. Central to this approach was the humoral theory of health: the idea that four bodily fluids, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, had to be kept in balance for a person to stay well. The Hippocratic Corpus, the collected writings attributed to him, contains about sixty works spanning diagnosis, epidemics, obstetrics, pediatrics, nutrition, and surgery. Whether Hippocrates himself wrote any of it is genuinely uncertain. Modern scholars conclude on stylistic grounds that the texts came from multiple authors, and note that no source from his own lifetime records him writing anything at all.
Why it matters
The Hippocratic shift, from asking which god was angry to asking what in the body had gone wrong, is the conceptual root of clinical medicine. Humoral theory itself was mistaken, but the commitment to natural causes and careful observation outlasted it, and the Hippocratic Oath became the enduring template for medical ethics. The corpus also shows how a body of knowledge can gather under one famous name whether or not that person authored it.
How we know
The Hippocratic Corpus survives as a large body of ancient Greek medical texts studied by classicists and medical historians, whose stylistic and linguistic analysis is the basis for the conclusion that the works had many authors rather than one.
Sources
- U.S. National Library of Medicine (History of Medicine). Greek Medicine · Reputable sourcenlm.nih.gov · The domain "nlm.nih.gov" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Hippocrates · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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