Hippocratic

Hip·poc·ra·tes, \hip-ˈäk-rə-ˌtēz\ (circa 460 BC–circa 370 BC), Greek physician. Hippocrates has been traditionally regarded as the founder of medicine. A teacher at an early Greek medical school, he strove to make an art and a science out of medicine and remove it from the realm of magic and superstition. Of the large body of works attributed to him, he probably wrote only a fraction. The corpus of Hippocratic writings covered such topics as diet, exercise, regimen, sleep, and external remedies. Hippocratic medicine divided diseases into acute and chronic, epidemic and endemic, malignant and benign. A basic belief of that school was that the four humors of the body (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) were the seats of disease. The Hippocratic oath owes much to the teachings and practice of Hippocrates although he probably did not personally write it.