The Father of Medicine was therefore the worthy product of his remarkable age. The genius which culminated in the works of the golden age of Greece could scarcely have left medicine without her Hippocrates; the harmony otherwise would have been incomplete.
The following genealogy of Hippocrates has been given by Tzetzes, but Mr. Grote says it is wholly mythical:—
Æsculapius was the father of Podalirius, who was the father of Hippolochus, who was the father of Sostratus, who was the father of Cleomyttades, who was the father of Theodorus, who was the father of Sostratus II., who was the father of Theodorus II., who was the father of Sostratus III., who was the father of Nebrus, who was the father of Gnosidicus, who was the father of Hippocrates I., who was the father of Heraclides, who was the father of Hippocrates II., otherwise called the Great Hippocrates.
Hippocrates was the first physician who delivered medicine from the thraldom of superstition and the sophistries of philosophers, and gave it an independent existence. It was impossible that our science should make progress so long as men believed that disease was caused by an angry demon or an offended divinity, and was only to be cured by expelling the one or propitiating the other. Hippocrates, with a discernment and a courage which was marvellous, considering his time, declared that no disease whatever came from the gods, but was in every instance traceable to a natural and intelligible cause. Before the Asclepiadæ there was no medical science; before Hippocrates there was no one mind with vision wide enough to take in all that had been done before—to select the precious from the worthless and embody it in a literature which remains to the present time a model of conciseness and condensation, and a practical text-book on all that concerns the art of healing as it was understood in his time. The minuteness of his observations, his rational, and accurate interpretation of all he saw, and his simple, methodical, truthful, and lucid descriptions of everything which he has recorded excite the admiration and compel the praise of all who have studied the works which he has left. Nor are his candour, honesty, caution, and experience less to be extolled. He confesses his errors, fully explains the measures adopted to cure his cases, and candidly admits that in one series of forty-two patients whom he attended only seventeen recovered, the others having perished in spite of the means he had proposed to save them. He was probably the first public teacher of the healing-art; his counsels were not whispered in the secret meetings of sacerdotal assemblies. He was the first to disclose the secrets of the art to the world; to strip it of the veil of mystery with which countless generations of magicians, thaumaturgists, and priestly healers had shrouded it, and to stand before his pupils to give oral instruction in anatomy and the other branches of his profession. Had he not been the Father of Medicine, he would have been known as one of the greatest of the philosophers. He first recognised Φύσις—Nature in the treatment of disease. Nature, he declared, was all-sufficient for our healing. She knows of herself all that is necessary for us, and so he called her “the just.” He attributed to her a faculty, Δύναμις; physicians are but her servants. The governing faculty, Δύναμις, nourishes, preserves, and increases all things.