Hippocrates: A Pioneer in Medicine

Over the course of history, many have tried to alleviate pain and illness. One such man was Hippocrates. He is considered one of the greatest pioneers in the medical field and although his is thought to be the "Father of Medicine", few facts are known about him. It is generally acepted that he was more or less a contemporary of Socrates and a practicing doctor of medicine. Believed to be born on the Island of Cos, he most likely studied under his father who was also a physician and may have traveled for a time, returning to Athens to teach and run his practice at Cos.

It too seems likely that Hippocrates would have been an Asclepiad, which were members of a society of physicians which traced its beginning to Asclepius, the god of healing. Hippocrates was intergrated with a group of medical treatises known as Hippocratic Corpus and over 60 medical treatises have conventionally been attributed to him. However, he could not have written all of these treatises. In fact, several of the extant treatises were written long after Hippocrates' demise. These treatises in question were written over about a two hundred year period and range in date from c. 510-c. 300 BCE, so he could not have authored all of them. Although it is likely that he did compose some of them, none can be positively identified as his.

One thing that is manifest today, Hippocrates was very educated adn was the first in changing the medical views of the world around him by being a major player in the movement to rid Ancient Greece of medical beliefs that focused on supernatural causes for illness. Hippocrates first gave the physician an independent standing, seperating him from the nature logician. Some of these beliefs were that spirits and demons were the culprit in a person's pain or illness. Imagine being sick and then having to contend with the idea that you cuold be possessed or plagued by harmful spirits! In that day and time, Shamans and Medicine Men used different herbal recipes to get rid of the patient's demons, which they believed to be the cause. "It is not until the New Stone Age, which began in Europe seven to ten thousand years