Hippocrates once said:
“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”
A collection of ancient written works associated with Hippocrates and his teachings, known as ‘The Hippocratic Corpus’, was a huge influence on the development of medicine in the centuries that followed. Diet, sleep, work and exercise were all seen as important factors that could play a role in producing – and reversing – the imbalance in humors that was believed to result in illness. Diseases were allowed to run their natural course with treatment restricted mainly to the careful use of specific herbal medicines. Surgery was very much seen as a last resort.
As his main unifying theory for the holistic understanding of the human organism and how it functions in health and disease, Hippocrates used the concept of the Four Humors. Health is a harmonious balance of the Four Humors. Disease results from their disharmony and imbalance. The physician’s job is to restore health by correcting the imbalance and restoring harmony to the humors.
