By today's standards, Hippocrates was a profoundly abnormal physician. Medicine's founding father routinely tasted his patients' urine, sampled their pus and earwax, and smelled and scrutinized their stool. He assessed the stickiness of their sweat and examined their blood, their phlegm, their tears, and their vomit. He became closely acquainted with their general disposition, family, and home, and he studied their facial expressions. In deciding upon a final diagnosis and treatment, Hippocrates . . . considered dietary habits, the season, the local prevailing winds, the water supply at the patient's residence, and the direction the home faced. . . .
Modern-day physicians often cringe or shake their heads when they hear descriptions of Hippocrates' diagnostic methods; laypeople, however, . . . wonder aloud at how nice it might be to have Hippocrates as their doctor.

—David H. Newman

history doctors. medicine

More quotations tagged with “history”

When Charles II had a fit while shaving in 1685, he was lucky to be treated with the finest medical advice of the day. He was attended by fourteen physicians who . . . shaved his head, applied blistering agents to his scalp, put special plasters made from pigeon droppings onto the soles of his feet, fed him bezoar stones (much-prized gallstones from the bladder of a goat), and made him drink forty drops of extract from a dead man's skull. He died two days later.

history medicine doctors

The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

history development law mathematics

Jews and blacks come from the same history. . . . We've just expressed our suffering differently as people. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complain; we just never thought of putting it to music.

history suffering complaining jewishness blackness

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

—Frederick Douglass

history heart sorrow tears unhappiness slavery songs relief

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

—Thomas Cahill

war history pain grace catastrophe outrage