Health & biology · c. 400 BCE

Hippocratic medicine

Greek physicians treated disease as natural, not divine, and taught doctors to observe and record.

The Hippocratic Corpus, about 60 texts from around 400 BCE, stressed prognosis, case histories and diet. Its ethical oath and clinical observation shaped Western medicine for two thousand years.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Edwin Smith Papyrus 1600 BCE
Alphabet (Proto-Sinaitic) 1850 BCE

What it led to 2

Galenic medicine 170
Variolation 1721

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Life expectancy in the UK since 1543 Latest: 81.3 years (2023) Source: Our World in Data

Life expectancy at birth Latest: 73.2 years (2023) Source: Our World in Data