Hippocrates

Hippocrates was born about 460 BC on the island of Cos into a family of physicians. The most famous doctor of antiquity, he is honoured as the father of medicine. He practised and taught throughout Greece, holding that diseases have natural causes rather than being punishments from the gods, and stressing careful observation of the patient, recording the course of illness, and the influence of diet and environment on health. The sixty or so medical works that bear his name, the Hippocratic Corpus, were written by him and many physicians of his school; its Oath remains a symbol of medical ethics.