Medical History IV:  Medicine in Ancient Greece: the Hippocractics

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website. The extracts might persuade you to read the book. Hippocratic doctors scolded traditional healers. Those pretenders ‘who first referred this disease to the gods’, the author complained, were like conjurors and charlatans. Elevating themselves above such dabblers in divination, the Hippocratics posited a natural theory of disease aetiology. Those calling themselves doctors (iatroi) had to compete with bone-setters, exorcists, root-cutters, incantatory priests, gymnasts and showmen, exposed to the…