Hippocrates Quotes
In acute diseases the physician must conduct his inquiries in the following way. First he must examine the face of the patient, and see whether it is like the faces of healthy people, and especially whether it is like its usual self. Such likeness will be the best sign, and the greatest unlikeness will be the most dangerous sign. The latter will be as follows. Nose sharp, eyes hollow, temples sunken, ears cold and contracted with their lobes turned outwards, the skin about the face hard and tense and parched, the colour of the face as a whole being yellow or black.
Hippocrates
Quotes to Explore
If you are not your own doctor, you are a fool.
Hippocrates
If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him.
Hippocrates
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joy, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs, and tears.
Hippocrates
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
Hippocrates
Who could have foretold, from the structure of the brain, that wine could derange its functions?
Hippocrates
Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food.
Hippocrates
Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to import them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.
Hippocrates
Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.
Hippocrates
Conclusions which are merely verbal cannot bear fruit, only those do which are based on demonstrated fact. For affirmation and talk are deceptive and treacherous. Wherefore one must hold fast to facts in generalizations also, and occupy oneself with facts persistently, if one is to acquire that ready and infallible habit which we call 'the art of medicine.'
Hippocrates
Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food.
Hippocrates
For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.
Hippocrates
Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.
Hippocrates
Get knowledge of the spine, for this is the requisite for many diseases.
Hippocrates
Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.
Hippocrates
All the causes of the sufferance refer themselves to this rule, that the strongest things most especially and decidedly hurt man, whether in health or in disease.
Hippocrates
It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary. It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities, by laying my hand upon the place, and extending my fingers toward it. Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another.
Hippocrates
It is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated (by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.
Hippocrates
All diseases begin in the gut.
Hippocrates
