Hippocratic medicine: disease has natural causes

The Hippocratic corpus and its oath reframed disease as a natural process with observable course and prognosis, not divine punishment.

Why it matters

Clinical observation, case records and 'first, do no harm' began here. The separation of medicine from theurgy is one of the most consequential acts of secular thinking in history.

People

Hippocrates of Kos

Threads

This event sits on Medicine.

Related events

• c. 150 CE – 210 CE

  Galen binds medicine to observation — and authority

  Galen of Pergamon dissected, experimented and wrote so prolifically that his corpus defined medicine in Europe and the Islamic world for 1,400 years.

  Medicine · europe

• c. 850 CE – 1100

  Bimaristans: hospitals as institutions

  Endowed public hospitals — bimaristans — spread through the Islamic world, offering care regardless of creed, with wards, teaching and medical licensing.

  Medicine · middle east

• 1543

  Vesalius corrects the body

  De humani corporis fabrica, with its woodcut anatomy, was built from Vesalius's own dissections — and showed that Galen, the unquestioned authority, had been wrong about much.

  Medicine · europe

Sources

• Encyclopædia Britannica — Hippocrates