On Ancient MedicineHippocrates

On Ancient Medicine is a treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus, written in the later fifth century BC, against a style of medicine that explains all disease by simple opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry. The author refuses to found the art on such hypotheses. Medicine, he argues, is already a genuine techne. It has a long history of discovery, rooted in the preparation of food and in the observation of what helps or harms the sick. Cooking and dietetics are the origin of the art; the physician extends the same discrimination to regimen, dosage, and the individual constitution.

Health is a blend of the body's humors. Pain and disease arise when one quality becomes unmixed and overpowering. The physician must know how foods and practices affect particular people, not only how abstract contraries cancel one another. Chapters 20-24 reject the Empedoclean project of explaining human nature from cosmology and the elements; that belongs to writing about nature, not to treating the sick. What the doctor needs is knowledge of the body's relation to food, drink, and daily habits, gained by experience and refined by reasoning. The treatise is one of the sharpest early statements of empirical medicine in the Greek tradition, and it sets a lasting opposition between bedside method and speculative system.