Hippocrates

Hippocrates of Cos was a physician of the fifth century BCE whom Plato mentions and whom later antiquity made the father of medicine, attaching to his name some sixty treatises by many hands over a century, the Hippocratic corpus. The Medical Writings the lists assign include the Oath, the Aphorisms, with their opening that life is short and the art long, Airs, Waters, Places, on the effect of climate, and the case histories of the Epidemics. Their common ground is that disease has natural causes, that the physician must observe, and that he must do no harm. Galen built on them and the Middle Ages swore by them.