Galen Vs. Hypocrates

578 Words3 Pages
Throughout the Ancient world there were many extremely knowledgeable physicians and philosophers who made significant contributions to medicine throughout their lifetimes. The most prominent examples of these are Galen and Hippocrates who both lived in the ancient Greek empire between about 500BC and 200AD. Hippocrates is best known for his work on the Hippocratic Collection and similarly Galen is also well known for the books he wrote. Both Galen and Hippocrates believed in diet and exercise as advice to avoid illness and disease and they both wrote down and documented all their discoveries and advice which extremely contributed to medicine, purely because it meant their knowledge could be used after they died, they also both observed patients very carefully and encouraged other doctors to do so, which made their ideas spread and contributions increase. However, in my opinion Hippocrates made a larger contribution to medicine that Galen did for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I think Hippocrates was made a greater contribution because the majority of Galen’s ideas and work was based on that of Hippocrates. Galen is most likely to have studied Hippocrates’ work whilst in Alexandria and we certainly know that Galen followed Hippocrates’ idea of the four humours, which although is actually incorrect, it still contributed to medicine for hundreds of years and helped promote the natural causes of disease rather than the super natural. Although you could say that Galen developed his own ideas from The Four Humours Theory, such as using ‘opposites’ to balance the humours, they proved to be even more inaccurate and so didn’t catch on. Galen was also a big advocate of interfering with the body and preferred to use methods such as bleeding and purging patients rather than using diet and medicine like Hippocrates so Galen would often harm patients more than heal which
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