EMERGENCE OF MODERN MEDICINE— ALVAREZ 427 



trained and well-equipped investigators, and success is likely to come 

 only as the result of a series of discoveries, all made in big university 

 laboratories. 



HIPPOCRATES, THE FATPIER OF MEDICINE 



But to get back to the beginnings of medical writing; let me tell 

 you a little about the greatest of all the ancient books. Really it is 

 a series of books written in large part by Hippocrates, he whom we 

 now call the father of medicine. He lived and worked in Greece 

 some 400 years before Christ. He was a modern type of scientific 

 physician in that he observed closely with a surprisingly open mind; 

 he described what he saw, he recorded his failures as well as his 

 successes, and he used everything of curative value that he could 

 find. As one would expect from this, much of what he wrote so long 

 ago is still of interest and value today. The few chapters that are 

 of little value are the ones, probably written by disciples, in which the 

 facts of observation were warped to fit one of those unprovable theories 

 of disease which are still so popular with irregular practitioners today. 



As many of you know, the Greeks looked upon the world as made 

 up of four elements: Fire, air, earth, and water, and the body of 

 four humors: Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These 

 humors were affected by the four qualities of matter: Heat, cold, 

 dryness, and moisture, and disease resulted when a humor became 

 too hot or too cold, or too dry or too moist. 



You who know something of modern chemistry and physics will 

 say: "How silly," and yet these humoral ideas dominated and re- 

 stricted and largely steriUzed medical thought for 2,000 years. Even 

 today, they affect our speech, and we say that a man is of a sanguine, 

 a phlegmatic, a choleric, a biHous, or a melancholy nature, that he is 

 good or bad humored, or that he has a warm or a cold temperament. 



We physicians revere Hippocrates because he was the first man to 

 teach, first, that many diseases clear up best if the physician does not 

 meddle too much, and, second, that medicine can advance only when 

 it breaks away from magic. Gradually, through the two milleniums 

 before the birth of Christ, physicians had been coming to see that some 

 diseases are due to injury and contagion and the wearing out of parts, 

 but so far as we have a record, Hippocrates was the first to go the 

 whole way and state that no disease is purely miraculous in origin. 

 He would not exclude even epilepsy, which then was called the sacred 

 disease, because of those terrifying fits which seem so obviously to 

 be due to possession by a god or a devil. 



And if through the ages, religiously minded people had only listened 

 to Hippocrates and had given his successors the freedom to dissect, 

 to perform autopsies, to experiment on animals, and to report honestly 



