Қадимі грек медицинасының 60-қа жуық еңбегінің жинағы

Collection of around 60 Ancient Greek medical works

The Hippocratic Corpus (Latin: Corpus Hippocraticum), or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings. The Hippocratic Corpus covers many diverse aspects of medicine, from Hippocrates' medical theories to what he devised to be ethical means of medical practice, to addressing various illnesses. Even though it is considered a singular corpus that represents Hippocratic medicine, they vary (sometimes significantly) in content, age, style, methods, and views practiced; therefore, authorship is largely unknown. Hippocrates began Western society's development of medicine, through a delicate blending of the art of healing and scientific observations. The Hippocratic Corpus became the foundation upon which Western medical practice was built.

Hippocrates was born c. 460 BCE on the Greek island of Kos. The verifiable details of his life are few, despite centuries of hagiographic accounts. According to tradition, Hippocrates was born into a hereditary order of priest like physicians known as Asclepiads. At the time, the practice of medicine involved spiritual and supernatural elements, corresponding to the prevailing belief that health and illness were conferred by the gods. In addition to his rejection of purely divine causes of illness, Hippocrates rejected the idea that medicine could only be practiced by those born into the priestly Asclepiad class like himself. Known as the father of medicine, Hippocrates was an admirable physician and teacher during his time. When considered among fellow ancient Greek philosophers and physicians, Hippocrates was considered the most influential in the evolution of medicine as a science. He focused on a natural approach to medicine, expressing that there had to be a comprehensive understanding of the patient's health, as well as harmony between nature and the individual. Hippocrates' focal point for medicine stemmed from the practice of scientific discipline. To enforce scientific discipline, Hippocrates based his medical principles on natural sciences, diagnosing, treating, and preventing medical diseases. Another contribution Hippocrates had to medicine was evidence based knowledge. Hippocrates was the first to ever establish the belief that by simply observing a patient, a physician would recognize symptoms and determine the disease. The works of the corpus range from Hippocrates' time and school to many centuries later and rival points of view. Franz Zacharias Ermerins identifies the hands of at least nineteen authors in the Hippocratic Corpus. However, the varied works of the corpus have gone under Hippocrates' name since antiquity. The corpus may be the remains of a library of Cos, or a collection compiled in the third century BC in Alexandria. However, the corpus includes works beyond those of the Coan school of ancient Greek medicine; works from the Cnidian school are included as well. Only a fraction of the Hippocratic writings have survived. The lost medical literature is sometimes referred to in the surviving treatises, as at the beginning of Regimen. Some Hippocratic works are known only in translation from their original Greek to other languages; given that the quality and accuracy of a translation without a surviving original cannot be known, it is difficult to identify the author with certainty. "Hippocratic" texts survive in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin.

The majority of the works in the Hippocratic Corpus date from the Classical period, the last decades of the 5th century BC and the first half of the 4th century BC. Among the later works, The Law, On the Heart, On the Physician, and On Sevens are all Hellenistic, while Precepts and On Decorum are from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Prorrhetics I is also mid fifth century. The oldest stratum is found in On the Nature of the Woman and On the Diseases of Women II.

The Hippocratic Corpus contains textbooks, lectures, research, notes and philosophical essays on various subjects in medicine, in no particular order. These works were written for different audiences, both specialists and laymen, and were sometimes written from opposing view points; significant contradictions can be found between works in the Corpus.

One significant portion of the corpus is made up of case histories. Books I and III of Epidemics contain forty two case histories, of which 60% (25) ended in the patient's death. Nearly all of the diseases described in the Corpus are endemic diseases: colds, consumption, pneumonia, etc.

In several texts of the corpus, the ancient physicians develop theories of illness, sometimes grappling with the methodological difficulties that lie in the way of effective and consistent diagnosis and treatment. As scholar Jacques Jouanna writes, "One of the great merits of the physicians of the Hippocratic Corpus is that they are not content to practice medicine and to commit their experience to writing, but that they have reflected on their own activity".

While the approaches range from empiricism to a rationalism reminiscent of the physical theories of the pre Socratic philosophers, these two tendencies can exist side by side: "The close association between knowledge and experience is characteristic of the Hippocratics," despite "the Platonic attempt to drive a wedge between the two". The author of On Ancient Medicine launches immediately into a critique of opponents who posit a single "cause in all cases" of disease, "having laid down as a hypothesis for their account hot or cold or wet or dry or anything else they want". The method put forward in this treatise "could certainly be characterized as an empirical one", preferring the effects of diet as observed by the senses to cosmological speculations, and it was seized upon by Hellenistic Empiricist doctors for this reason. However, "unlike the Empiricists, the author does not claim that the doctor's knowledge is limited to what can be observed by the senses. On the contrary, he requires the doctor to have quite extensive knowledge of aspects of the human constitution that cannot be observed directly, such as the state of the patient's humors and internal organs".

The author of The Art is at pains to defend the status of medicine as an art (techne), against opponents who (perhaps following Protagoras' critique of expert knowledge) claim it produces no better results against disease than chance (an attack served by the fact that doctors refused to treat the serious and difficult cases they judged to be incurable by their art). The treatise may be considered "the first attempt at general epistemology bequeathed to us by antiquity", although this may only be because we have lost fifth century rhetorical works that took a similar approach. For this writer, as for the author of On the Places in Man, the art of medicine has been wholly discovered. While for the author of On the Places in Man "the principles discovered in it clearly have very little need of good luck", the author of The Art acknowledges the practical limitations that arise in the therapeutic application of these principles. Likewise for the author of On Regimen, the "knowledge and discernment of the nature of man in general—knowledge of its primary constituents and discernment of the components by which it is controlled" may be completely worked out, and yet in practice it is difficult to determine and apply the correct and proportionate diet and exercise to the individual patient.

The Hippocratic Corpus explains diseases using the Four Humours in which are described a Phlegm, Yellow Bile, Blood and Black Bile. These medical writings associated each of the humours with a specific organ which goes as follows; blood with the heart, yellow bile with the liver, black bile with the spleen and phlegm with the brain. With each humour, there were specific properties that applied to changes in the fluids such as blood is hot and moist, phlegm is cold and moist, yellow bile is hot and dry and black bile is cold and dry. The authors of the Hippocratic Corpus described that these four humors play a very important role in our health as when there is a little or too much of one of the humours, a disease might occur.

Whatever their disagreements, the Hippocratic writers agree in rejecting divine and religious causes and remedies of disease in favor of natural mechanisms. Hippocratic medicine had been formulated to hold true to the belief that "medicine should be practiced as a scientific discipline based on the natural sciences, diagnosing and preventing disease as well as treating them." In addition to Greek poetry and tragedy, magicians, charlatans, and purifiers can also be considered responsible for the widespread of 'sacred' explanations. Doing this allowed them to step in and provide inefficacious remedies that could convince the gods to intervene and fix these sacred issues experienced by individuals. Thus On the Sacred Disease considers that epilepsy (the so called "sacred" disease) "has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character." An exception to this rule is found in Dreams (Regime IV), in which prayers to the gods are prescribed alongside more typically Hippocratic interventions. Though materialistic determinism goes back in Greek thought at least to Leucippus, "One of the greatest virtues of the physicians of the Hippocratic Collection is to have stated, in its most universal form, what was later to be called the principle of determinism. All that occurs has a cause. It is in the treatise of The Art that the most theoretical statement of this principle is to be found: 'Indeed, under a close examination spontaneity disappears; for everything that occurs will be found to do so through something [dia ti].'" In a famous passage of On Ancient Medicine, the author insists on the importance of knowledge of causal explanations: "It is not sufficient to learn simply that cheese is a bad food, as it gives a pain to one who eats a surfeit of it; we must know what the pain is, the reasons for it [dia ti], and which constituent of man is harmfully affected."

The writers of the treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus emphasized a natural approach to health and wellness. During the Asclepius paradigm, Hippocrates used a natural way to treat disease. It remains in use, though rarely in its original form. Seemingly, the main and most problematic topic covered in urology was that of bladder disease in patients, especially when urinary tract stones (that is, stones within either the kidneys or the bladder) were present. Urinary tract stones, in general, have been seen within records all throughout history, even as far back as the ancient days of Egypt. Other than leakage of urine into the body cavity, another common complication was that of the cells of the testes dying due to the spermatic cord inadvertently being cut during the procedure. In fact, due to these and other complications and the lack of antiseptics and pain medicines, the Hippocratic Oath opted for the avoidance of surgery – unless absolutely necessary – especially when concerning surgeries that dealt with the urinary tract and more so when stone removal was the intent. The Hippocratic texts describe wine as a powerful substance, that when consumed in excess can cause physical disorders, today known as, intoxication. Although the negative effects of wine on the human body are documented within the Hippocratic Corpus, the author/authors maintain an objective attitude towards wine. During this time, those studying medicine were interested in the physical effects of wine, therefore no medical text condemned the use of wine in excess. According to the Hippocratic text, the consumption of wine significantly affects two regions of the body: the head and the lower body cavity. An overall effect of wine that all Greek doctors of the time have observed and agree on is its warming property. Therefore, wine's properties are described as "hot and dry." Wine was first defined as a food by all doctors. Directions for consumption varied based on gender, season, and other events in daily life. Men were encouraged to consume dark, undiluted wine before copulation, not to the point of intoxication, however enough to provide power and guarantee strength to the fetus. Patients with pneumonia like illnesses would soak in a wine mixture and breath in the vapors with the intent to expel the pus from their lungs. Based on modern knowledge, this disease was mumps, which causes salivary glands under the ears to swell. It is remarkable that this ancient work describes symptoms so vividly that modern doctors can diagnose the cause a thousand years later. This section of the Hippocratic Corpus assumes that when looking at human disease and the health of humans, you must look at the seasons, winds and orientation of places, the nature of the water, the nature of the soil and the lifestyle of the inhabitants of a particular city. Epidemics 1 goes on to describe the climate on two occasions and the diseases associated with them, called constitutions. The symptoms described include more serious, sometimes lethal, fevers, eye infections, and dysentery.

Jaundice is a disease that is mentioned numerous times throughout and is described as occurring in five ways. Jaundice is when the skin or eyes turn yellow. The Greek physicians thought of Jaundice to be a disease itself rather than what medical professionals know now to be a symptom of various other diseases. The Greeks also believed that there were five kinds of jaundice that can occur and report the differences between them. The first kind can quickly turn fatal. The skin appears to be green. The analogy made in the text is that the skin is greener than a green lizard. The several forms of jaundice that the Greek physicians proclaimed might be because jaundice occurs due to varying sicknesses like hepatitis, gallstones and tumors. The diverse set of symptoms were probably the effects of the sicknesses rather than the jaundice itself.

An empyema is a Greek word derived from the word empyein which means "pus producing". According to the Hippocratic Corpus, they can occur in the thorax, the uterus, the bladder, the ear, and other parts of the body. Along with the variety of skin diseases described in the Hippocratic Corpus is the suggest treatment. These treatments stem from the belief that dermatologic diseases were a result of imbalance in body humors. For relief from various dermatologic conditions, the Hippocratic text recommends spring water or seawater baths and topical application of a fatty substance as a form of treatment.

Menses is another way of wording menstruation or blood flow discharge from the uterus. There are multiple sections within the works dedicated to different types of menses along with their understood meanings of the time. There is a large portion dedicated to what a doctor should expect of standard menses along with some slight variations. Within the Diseases of Women I, the average amount of menses for healthy women should be somewhere around a half pint for around two three days. The flow itself is considered to require the viewers judgment but does go on to say that it should flow like a blood from a sacrificial lamb, indicating the timeframe of the work, and that the blood should coagulate readily. Fever is the outlier that have different treatments based on the treaty. Bathing with oils along with lily oil rubbed on the woman's head is recommended. Oil should also be applied to her uterus. Vapor baths in general are the main focus for treatment after childbirth. The change with a fever is to avoid bathing. Vapor treatment with an application using a hot towel is recommended on her lower stomach and back. A diet of boiled meal with rue or barley gruel is recommended seemingly for with or without a fever. It is often praised for its objectivity and conciseness, yet some have criticized it as being "grave and austere". Francis Adams, a translator of the Corpus, goes further and calls it sometimes "obscure". Of course, not all of the Corpus is of this "laconic" style, though most of it is. It was Hippocratic practice to write in this style. The whole corpus is written in Ionic Greek, though the island of Cos was in a region that spoke Doric Greek. The Art and On Breaths show the influence of Sophistic rhetoric; they "are characterized by long introductions and conclusions, antitheses, anaphoras, and sound effects typical of Gorgianic style". Other works also have rhetorical elements. In general, it can be said that "the Hippocratic physician was also an orator", with his role including public speeches and "verbal wrestling matches".

The entire Hippocratic Corpus was first printed as a unit in 1525. This edition was in Latin and was edited by Marcus Fabius Calvus in Rome. The first complete Greek edition followed the next year from the Aldine Press in Venice. A significant edition was that of Émile Littré who spent twenty two years (1839–1861) working diligently on a complete Greek edition and French translation of the Hippocratic Corpus. This was scholarly, yet sometimes inaccurate and awkward. Another edition of note was that of Franz Zacharias Ermerins, published in Utrecht between 1859 and 1864. The first four Loeb volumes were published in 1923–1931, and seven further volumes between 1988 and 2012.