CHAPTER II.
THE MEDICINE OF HIPPOCRATES AND HIS PERIOD.
Hippocrates first delivered Medicine from the Thraldom of Superstition.—Dissection of the Human Body and Rise of Anatomy.—Hippocrates, Father of Medicine and Surgery.—The Law.—Plato.
Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine,” was born at Cos,[384] 460 B.C. On his father’s side he was believed to be descended from Æsculapius, and through his mother from Hercules. A member of the family of the Asclepiadæ, of a descent of three hundred years, he had the advantage of studying medicine under his father, Heraclides, in the Asclepion of Cos. Herodicus of Selymbria taught him medical gymnastics, and Democritus of Abdera and Gorgias of Leontini were his masters in literature and philosophy. He travelled widely, and taught and practised at Athens, dying at an age variously stated as 85, 90, 104, and 109. Fortunate in the opportunities offered by his birth and position, he was still more fortunate in his time—the age of Pericles—in which Greece reached its noblest development, and the arts and sciences achieved their greatest triumphs. It was the age of Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus, Pindar, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Phidias. Philosophy, poetry, literature, and sculpture found in these great minds their most perfect exponents. Medicine, in the person of Hippocrates, was to find its first and most distinguished author-physician.
The Father of Medicine was therefore the worthy product of his remarkable age. The genius which culminated in the works of the golden age of Greece could scarcely have left medicine without her Hippocrates; the harmony otherwise would have been incomplete.
The following genealogy of Hippocrates has been given by Tzetzes, but Mr. Grote says it is wholly mythical:—
Æsculapius was the father of Podalirius, who was the father of Hippolochus, who was the father of Sostratus, who was the father of Cleomyttades, who was the father of Theodorus, who was the father of Sostratus II., who was the father of Theodorus II., who was the father of Sostratus III., who was the father of Nebrus, who was the father of Gnosidicus, who was the father of Hippocrates I., who was the father of Heraclides, who was the father of Hippocrates II., otherwise called the Great Hippocrates.
Hippocrates was the first physician who delivered medicine from the thraldom of superstition and the sophistries of philosophers, and gave it an independent existence. It was impossible that our science should make progress so long as men believed that disease was caused by an angry demon or an offended divinity, and was only to be cured by expelling the one or propitiating the other. Hippocrates, with a discernment and a courage which was marvellous, considering his time, declared that no disease whatever came from the gods, but was in every instance traceable to a natural and intelligible cause. Before the Asclepiadæ there was no medical science; before Hippocrates there was no one mind with vision wide enough to take in all that had been done before—to select the precious from the worthless and embody it in a literature which remains to the present time a model of conciseness and condensation, and a practical text-book on all that concerns the art of healing as it was understood in his time. The minuteness of his observations, his rational, and accurate interpretation of all he saw, and his simple, methodical, truthful, and lucid descriptions of everything which he has recorded excite the admiration and compel the praise of all who have studied the works which he has left. Nor are his candour, honesty, caution, and experience less to be extolled. He confesses his errors, fully explains the measures adopted to cure his cases, and candidly admits that in one series of forty-two patients whom he attended only seventeen recovered, the others having perished in spite of the means he had proposed to save them. He was probably the first public teacher of the healing-art; his counsels were not whispered in the secret meetings of sacerdotal assemblies. He was the first to disclose the secrets of the art to the world; to strip it of the veil of mystery with which countless generations of magicians, thaumaturgists, and priestly healers had shrouded it, and to stand before his pupils to give oral instruction in anatomy and the other branches of his profession. Had he not been the Father of Medicine, he would have been known as one of the greatest of the philosophers. He first recognised Φύσις—Nature in the treatment of disease. Nature, he declared, was all-sufficient for our healing. She knows of herself all that is necessary for us, and so he called her “the just.” He attributed to her a faculty, Δύναμις; physicians are but her servants. The governing faculty, Δύναμις, nourishes, preserves, and increases all things.
Galen states that the greater part of Aristotle’s physiology was taken from Hippocrates. It has been the custom to make light of his anatomical knowledge, and to say that in face of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of procuring subjects for dissection, he could have had but little exact knowledge of the human body; but it is certain that by some means or other he must have dissected it. In proof of this it is only necessary to mention his treatise On the Articulations, especially that part of it which relates to the dislocation of the shoulder joint. Dr. Adams, in one of his valuable notes on the works of Hippocrates,[385] says: “The language of our author in this place puts it beyond all doubt that human dissection was practised in his age.” In Ashurst’s International Encyclopædia of Surgery[386] his descriptions of all dislocations are declared to be wonderfully accurate; and the writer adds that it is the greatest error imaginable to suppose, with the common conceit of our day, that all ingenious and useful improvements in surgery belong to the present age. In the treatise on the Sacred Disease (epilepsy), his description of the brain in man proves that he was acquainted with its dissection.
In the treatise on the heart, again, the construction of that organ in the human body is referred to. Other allusions to the internal structure of the human frame in the Hippocratic treatises serve to confirm our opinion; and if it be objected that some of these are probably not genuine, they must at least be as old as his period, and it was far more likely that he should have written or inspired them than that they should have emanated from an inferior source. Those who argue to the contrary do so on the same grounds as the Greek commentators, who say that the Iliad and Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by some other poet of the same name. Dr. Adams is confident, from his familiarity with the works of Hippocrates, that the knowledge of human anatomy exhibited therein had its origin in actual dissection, and he adds that: “I do not at present recollect a single instance of mistake committed by him in any of his anatomical descriptions, if we except that with regard to the sutures of the head, and even in that case I have endeavoured to show that the meaning of the passage is very equivocal.”[387] There is no doubt, in fact, that a great deal more human dissection went on than the Greek doctors dared to acknowledge for fear of exciting popular prejudice. Less than a hundred years after the death of Hippocrates there was abundant and open dissection of the human body in the schools of Alexandria, and it is incredible that the practice only received popular sanction at that particular time. Yet the anatomy of Hippocrates was very imperfect. The nerves, sinews, and ligaments were confounded together, all being classed as νεῦρον or τόνος.
The blood-vessels were supposed to contain both blood and air, and were called φλέβες; the trachea was called an “artery.”