46 Fun Facts About Hippocrates

By what title is Hippocrates traditionally known?

The Father of Medicine is his traditional title, yet little is known for certain of what he himself wrote or did: his deeds were merged with those of the doctors who wrote under his name.

On which Greek island was Hippocrates born around 460 BC?

Kos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor, was his birthplace around 460 BC, but he did not stay: he taught and practised across the Greek world, travelling as far north as Thrace.

Which Greek god, invoked as a healer, is the first that the Hippocratic Oath swears by?

Apollo heads the list of healing gods the Oath calls to witness, yet scholars doubt Hippocrates wrote it, and it may date from after his death.

In a famous legend, Hippocrates refuses rich gifts to treat the plague-stricken army of which enemy empire?

Persia's king Artaxerxes is said to have begged him to cure his troops; Hippocrates would not help an enemy of Greece, a scene Girodet painted in 1792, though historians treat the tale as fiction.

Hippocrates is said to have named tumours 'karkinos' after which creature, whose legs their swollen veins recalled?

Crab is the meaning of karkinos and of the Roman word that later replaced it, cancer; the name is credited to Hippocrates, who saw a tumour's spreading veins as the legs of the animal.

The name Hippocrates is built on the Greek word for which animal?

Horse: the name joins hippos, 'horse', and kratos, 'power'. Horse names often signalled a noble family, and in Aristophanes's comedy The Clouds a well-born wife insists that her son's name must have a horse in it.

Which two contemporaries mention Hippocrates in passing in their writings?

Plato and Aristotle each mention him only in passing, Plato as a famous doctor who taught for a fee; almost everything else told of his life was written some 500 years later.

What was hippocras, the medieval drink named after Hippocrates?

Spiced, sweetened wine took his name because it was strained through a cloth filter bag known as a Hippocratic sleeve; dictionaries still define hippocras as a medicinal cordial.

In which city of Thessaly did Hippocrates probably die?

Larissa lay far from his island birthplace because he spent his life travelling to teach and practise; accounts of his age at death range from his eighties to well over 100.

Where does Dante place Hippocrates in the Divine Comedy?

In Limbo, among the virtuous pagans, Dante sees Hippocrates beside Euclid and Ptolemy: great minds who died unbaptised, spared torment but shut out of Heaven.

What were the four humours in Hippocratic medicine?

Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile were the four humours; illness meant an excess or a shortage of one, an idea that dominated Western medicine for some two thousand years.

Which disease's attacks, returning every third or fourth day, were classified in the Hippocratic writings?

Malaria lay behind the 'tertian' and 'quartan' attacks the Hippocratic writers logged, named for the day on which they came back; it took another two thousand years and more to prove that mosquitoes spread it.

Why did Greek medicine in Hippocrates's time know almost nothing of anatomy?

A taboo forbade dissecting humans, so Hippocratic writers blurred arteries, veins and nerves together and spoke of the muscles simply as 'flesh'.

In Hippocratic medicine, what was a 'crisis'?

The turning point of an illness was its crisis: the patient either began to recover or sank towards death, and doctors expected it on set 'critical days' counted from the onset.

What Latin phrase sums up the Hippocratic idea that the body can heal itself?

Vis medicatrix naturae, 'the healing power of nature', expresses the Hippocratic belief that the body rebalances itself; treatment aimed to ease that process with rest and immobilisation.

What mixture did Hippocrates prescribe as a generalised treatment?

Honey and vinegar, mixed as oxymel, suited a doctor wary of strong drugs that might be wrongly chosen; the treatise on regimen in acute diseases even says to serve it hot in winter and cold in summer.

Which folk saying about food is sometimes traced to Hippocrates?

'Feed a cold, starve a fever' is often traced to Hippocratic advice that fasting helped fever patients, fever then being regarded as a disease in itself rather than a symptom.

What device named after Hippocrates used tension to set broken bones?

The Hippocratic bench, or scamnum, used ropes and a windlass to stretch a limb or the spine so that fractures and dislocations could be set, an ancestor of modern orthopaedic traction.

What diagnostic sign of chronic lung disease is Hippocrates credited with first describing?

Clubbing of the fingers has been read as a sign of serious disease since Hippocrates's day, which is why doctors still call bulbous fingertips 'Hippocratic fingers'.

Shakespeare alludes to the 'Hippocratic face' of a dying person when describing whose death in Henry V?

Falstaff's death is reported by Mistress Quickly in Henry V ('his nose was as sharp as a pen'), echoing the Hippocratic face, the pinched look of the dying described in Prognostics.

Hippocrates is described as the first documented surgeon of which part of the body?

Hippocrates is called the first documented chest surgeon: the Corpus describes draining an empyema by cutting between the ribs and inserting a metal tube, the principle of later chest-drain surgery.

Which condition, long called the 'sacred disease', did a Hippocratic treatise insist had a natural cause?

Epilepsy was the 'sacred disease'; the treatise traced it to phlegm blocking the brain and argued that no god had sent it, since prayers and incantations had never cured anyone.

Which famous 'Hippocratic' saying is probably a misquotation?

'Let food be thy medicine' appears nowhere in the Hippocratic writings and its true origin is unknown; the same goes for 'Walking is man's best medicine', another line often pinned on him.

Which Hippocratic work opens with the words 'Life is short, and Art long'?

Aphorisms begins with the line, which goes on 'the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult'; later translators turned it round into the motto 'Ars longa, vita brevis'.

In which city were anonymous medical works probably gathered under Hippocrates's name?

Alexandria's library collected the medical prose of earlier centuries, and a librarian there may have filed it all under Hippocrates because of his fame; the works were written by many hands.

Which of these is a genuine treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus?

On Airs, Waters and Places is a genuine Hippocratic work: it tells a doctor arriving in a strange town to study its winds, its water and how it lies to the sun; the other titles belong to a philosopher and a Roman poet.

Which two principles of medical ethics does the Hippocratic Oath establish?

Confidentiality and non-maleficence both come from the Oath, which vows to keep secret what is seen in practice and to keep patients from harm; few schools still use the original wording, preferring modern rewrites.

Which woman gives her name to an 1893 pledge modelled on the Hippocratic Oath?

Florence Nightingale never wrote it: Lystra Gretter and a committee at a Detroit nursing school composed the pledge and named it as a token of esteem for the founder of modern nursing.

Which practice does the original Hippocratic Oath tell doctors to leave to other craftsmen?

Using the knife is renounced in the Oath, 'not even on sufferers from stone'; the vow is a puzzle, because other Hippocratic works give detailed instructions for surgery.

What modern medical oath did the World Medical Association draft in 1948?

The Declaration of Geneva was drafted in the shadow of wartime medical crimes, as a modern doctor's pledge to stand in for the ancient oath; it has been amended several times since.

Which part of the ancient Oath did Louis Lasagna's widely used 1964 rewrite drop?

The appeal to the gods went: Lasagna, later a dean at Tufts, wrote a secular oath instead, adding that 'there is art to medicine as well as science'.

Which Greek physician, born in AD 129, carried the Hippocratic tradition into the Roman Empire?

Galen, born at Pergamon in AD 129, wrote commentaries on the Hippocratic treatises and built his system on Hippocratic humoral theory, carrying it to the Islamic world and medieval Europe.

Beneath what, according to legend, did Hippocrates teach his pupils?

A plane tree in the main town of his native island is shown to visitors as the spot; the present tree is far too young to be his, but is claimed as a descendant of the original.

A cutting from the Tree of Hippocrates was planted at which US institution in the 1960s?

A cutting from the Tree of Hippocrates, presented by Greece, was planted on the grounds of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland; many medical schools claim descendants of the tree.

In The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Hippocrates's daughter is transformed into what?

A dragon, in the tale, thanks to the goddess Diana; a knight's kiss on the mouth would turn her back into a woman, but the knight who tries flees at the sight of her and is flung into the sea.

What is 'risus sardonicus', sometimes called the Hippocratic smile?

A sustained spasm of the facial muscles fixes the face in a grin, most often in tetanus; 'sardonic' goes back to a Greek belief that a Sardinian plant made its victims die with a convulsive laugh.

Hippocrates's legendary genealogy traces his father's line back to which divine figure?

Asklepius, the god of healing, heads the legendary family tree, which is why the doctors of Hippocrates's clan were known as Asclepiads.

What did researchers at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai report finding in 2017?

A Hippocratic medical recipe had been hiding in a palimpsest: the parchment was erased and reused for a Bible text, and the older writing lay unnoticed beneath it for centuries.

What did 'Project Hippocrates', a 1990s Carnegie Mellon effort, stand for?

High Performance Computing for Robot-Assisted Surgery was bent to fit the name, written 'HIgh PerfOrmance Computing for Robot-AssisTEd Surgery'; the project aimed surgical robots at hip replacements.

What common condition is said to leave a man with a 'Hippocratic wreath'?

Baldness of the male pattern can spare a rim of hair at the sides and back of the head, the so-called Hippocratic wreath; a Hippocratic saying holds that eunuchs never go bald, and modern hormone studies bear it out.

According to his ancient biographer, Hippocrates studied philosophy under which thinker?

Democritus, pioneer of the theory of atoms, is named as his master in philosophy alongside the orator Gorgias; later forgers even invented letters between the two men.

In what dialect of Greek is the Hippocratic Corpus written?

The Corpus is written in Ionic, the dialect of the Asia Minor coast and of early scientific prose, although Hippocrates's home island lay in Doric-speaking territory.

The original Hippocratic Oath binds a doctor to pass on his art without fee to whom?

His teacher's sons were to be treated as his own brothers and taught free; the Oath reads like the contract of a family craft, handed down from father to son.

The Hippocratic Corpus was first printed complete in Rome in 1525, in which language?

Latin came first: Marco Fabio Calvo's translation appeared in Rome a year before the Aldine Press in Venice printed the complete Greek original.

Legend gave Hippocrates divine ancestry on his father's side and traced his mother's line to which hero?

Heracles was claimed for his mother's side, completing a pedigree fit for a legend; such tales about his family multiplied in the centuries after his death, as his fame outgrew the facts.

In 2005 which country's leader declared doctors should swear an oath to him instead of the Hippocratic Oath?

Turkmenistan's president Saparmurat Niyazov ordered the oath to himself in November 2005, months after closing every hospital outside the capital; he died the following year.