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Article: Hippocrates of Cos
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- Encyclopedia of Public Health
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HIPPOCRATES OF COS
Celebrated as the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates (460
–
377 b.c.e.) was born on the Island of Cos, traveled widely throughout classical Greece in the period of its civilization's greatest achievements, and died in Thessaly. He and his pupils made contributions to medical thinking that have endured for 2.5 millennia. His therapies, based on the humoral theory that imbalance among the four "humors" (phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile) caused most diseases, were flawed, but this does not detract from the excellence of the meticulous descriptions of diseases and their accounts of their natural history that have come down to us in the Hippocratic aphorisms ...