Hippocrates

Physicians have used my name for two thousand years. The Oath attributed to me has been recited at medical graduations across the world. I would like to say that the medicine I practised resembles what is now practised under my name — but it does not. I did not know about bacteria. I did not know about cells. I thought illness came from imbalances in four...

The Oath that bears my name is probably not mine. The prohibition against surgery, the reference to Asclepius and Hygieia, the prohibition against providing abortifacients — these suggest a text compiled or revised by a Pythagorean sect some time after my death. The earliest complete manuscript dates from the tenth century AD.

What I taught was simpler...

Whoever would investigate medicine properly should consider seasons, winds, waters, places, and the habits of those who live there. Disease does not fall from Olympus as an insult. It arises in bodies situated in environments. Begin with observation, not accusation.

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment dangerous, judgment difficult. The physician must be prepared not only to do what is right himself, but to make the patient, attendants, and circumstances cooperate. Medicine is knowledge under pressure.

I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, and never to harm or wrong them. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone who asks for it, nor suggest such counsel. Into whatever house I enter I will go for the benefit of the sick, keeping free from all intentional wrong. This I swear. The first obligation of the healer is the...

The so-called sacred disease — epilepsy — is no more divine than any other disease. It has a natural cause, like all afflictions, and its apparent mystery comes from ignorance. Those who first called it sacred were, I suspect, the kind of men who still exist: charlatans who need the protection of religion because they have no knowledge to offer. The cure...

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future. He must mediate these things with respect to the disease. To see the whole — what has happened, what is happening, what is likely to happen — gives patients confidence and saves physicians from guessing. Prognosis is not prophecy. It is the logical conclusion of...

Medicine does not need to postulate abstract philosophical principles — hot, cold, wet, dry — as the cause of disease. Those who do import philosophy into medicine proceed from what they do not understand toward what they cannot observe. Medicine found its own method long ago: discovery through necessity, through the long experience of what helps sick...

Let food be thy medicine. The body has its own wisdom if it is not constantly overloaded or deprived. Regimen — diet, exercise, sleep, climate — shapes health long before crisis appears. The physician who waits for disease to announce itself has already fallen behind. Prevention is the medicine that patients deny themselves and pay the physician to restore.

Regarding disease, practise two things: do good, or at least do no harm. This is not a counsel of timidity. It is the recognition that medicine operates in a complex system where confident intervention can make things worse. The physician's eagerness to act must always be weighed against the patient's need not to be acted upon incorrectly.