#hippocrates

Hippocrates the Alchemist

Monty Python's World Cup Team of Philosophers, Mount Olympus

Run, Socrates, run! Hippocrates is gaining on you — nope! He tripped on his robe. Hey Socrates, look out for that asp!

Fit, strong and somewhat bedazzled, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Democritus of Abdera and more are waiting for their turn at this hotly contested field race. 😆

Socrates joins us today from Athens until 399 BCE, when he's due to expire from hemlock; after his untimely death, Plato will step in from all the way across the Mediterranean. He's gathering his robes. The underfed lions and other wild animals are ready for a meal, and let me tell you, sports fans, they love philosopher meat.

June 24, 2026

By Unknown author Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27729929

While the idea of humors existed prior to the Hippocratic writers, having its foundation in the five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, it was the Hippocratics who formalized the idea that the humors were bodily fluids. Traditionally, it was Hippocrates who posited that the humors were blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile as well as how deficiencies or excesses of these can cause or be a sign of illness. Not only did the humors need to be balanced, they also needed to be 'well mixed' through the body, with On the Nature of Man from the Hippocratic Corpus saying '[t]he body depends heavily on the four humors because their balanced combination helps to keep people in good health. Having the right amount of humor is essential for health. The pathophysiology of disease is consequentially brought on by humor excess and/or deficiencies'.

Galen, who came later, took Hippocrates' idea and built on it, expanding the idea of humors to include foods affecting the body's ability to produce the humors and thus affecting the balance within the body. From this, he then deduced that the seasons, time of life, and where a person lived would also impact the balance of humors in a person. These ideas were used to predict what type of illnesses would afflict people and where and when certain diseases would afflict people.

From being fluids within the body, it wasn't much of a leap to posit that the humors were the source of people's temperaments, that the balance of the four was ideal, but that most people tended to have a blend of warm and cold with dry or moist temperaments, with one of each pair being predominant, which would align with one of the humors. Hot and dry would correspond with yellow bile, ξανθὴ χολή, xanthe chole in Ancient Greek, or what became known as the choleric temperament, warm and most would align to blood, αἷμα, haima, which would be sanguine people. Those who were cold and dry would be aligned to black bile, μέλαινα χολή, melaina chole, and the melancholic disposition while cold and most would align to phlegm, φλέγμα, phlegma, and the phlegmatic personality. Galen even added that '[s]harpness and intelligence (ὀξὺ καὶ συνετόν) are caused by yellow bile in the soul, perseverance and consistency (ἑδραῖον καὶ βέβαιον) by the melancholic humor, and simplicity and naivety (ἁπλοῦν καὶ ἠλιθιώτερον) by blood. But the nature of phlegm has no effect on the character of the soul (τοῦ δὲ φλέγµατος ἡ φύσις εἰς µὲν ἠθοποιῗαν ἄχρηστος)'.

By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/0d/0e/e9d3d979e732af7f22a1b41d1110.jpg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36062899

Perhaps the most well known text attributed to Hippocrates is his eponymous oath listing the ethics for physicians, but as with most things about Hippocrates, it's a bit more complicated than 'Hippocrates wrote it and his followers passed it on'. The first known reference that we know of to the oath is from the 40s CE by Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman Emperor Claudius, who praised it highly. There is a fragment of a parchment that is from about 300 CE in Greek. Galen, the Greek physician who lived from 129-216 CE, wrote about the oath near the end of his life, but the Greek source he used was lost, though it was translated into Syriac and then Arabic by 900 CE and was lost, but quoted by writers who came after, though a fragment of an early copy of Galen's work was recently discovered.

That said, the original was likely written sometime between the fifth and third centuries BCE, after medical knowledge was beginning to be passed on to those outside the family group, as evidenced by the part where the oath taker says they will 'hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents;…consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it without fee or indenture', but family transmission was still the dominant method of education, as well as 'when he [the teacher] is in need of money to share mine with him'. Galen opines that the reason for these clauses is that fewer sons wanted to follow their father into the medical field. The clauses about maintaining a holy life, such as 'I will keep pure and holy way I will guard my life and craft' and '[i]nto as many houses as I may enter, I will enter for the benefit of the sick, keeping far from all voluntary wrongdoing and other corrupting behaviour', places the oath around 300 BCE, though '[e]ven if the Oath was composed by one of Hippocrates' followers, few of the other authors who were later grouped by ancient scholars as his "Hippocratic" heirs obeyed or, presumably, swore it'. It wasn't until around the third century CE that it was written that 'it is proper, at least as I see it, to make the beginning of learning from the Hippocratic Oath, since it was established as a most just law and one extremely useful for life'.