Born: 460 BC Kos, Greece
Died: 377 BC Larissa, Greece

Hippocrates is regarded as the father of Western medicine. He systematised medical treatments, disentangling them from religion and superstitions. He trained physicians in his methods and, with his followers, is responsible for authoring a large body of medical textbooks
Hippocrates was born in 460 BC (the first year of the 80th Olympiad) on the island of Kos in Ancient Greece. On a timeline of illustrious scholars, Hippocrates lived after Pythagoras; at the same time as Socrates, Plato, and Democritus; and he was still alive during Aristotle’s early life.
What we know of Hippocrates’ life consists of fragments, such as a mention in Plato’s work Protagorus, where we learn that Hippocrates of Kos is the greatest of Greek physicians. In Plato’s Phaedrus we learn that Hippocrates is an acclaimed teacher who has his own medical doctrine. We can be reasonably certain this information is reliable, because it comes from Hippocrates’ own time and from the great city of Athens, indicating his renown had spread there.About 60 medical writings have survived that bear his name, most of which were not written by him. He has been revered for his ethical standards in medical practice, mainly for the Hippocratic Oath, a seminal document on the ethics of medical practice, was attributed to Hippocrates in antiquity although new information shows it may have been written after his death.
Hippocrates was a member of the Asclepiad family, an aristocratic family highly regarded as medical practitioners, with a proud history of serving Greece. His grandfather’s name was Hippocrates and his father’s Heraclides. His mother was Phaenareta, who was also from a noble family.
Hippocrates, as tradition dictated, was trained by his father to be a physician. He began work on Kos. After his parents had died and his daughter had married, Hippocrates sailed from Kos to the Thessaly region of the Greek mainland, accompanied by his sons. Thessaly is where Hippocrates’ ancestors were born. In Thessaly, Hippocrates probably practised in a number of cities researching one of his doctrines, that a person’s local environment affects their health. Hippocrates was credited by the disciples of Pythagoras of allying philosophy and medicine.[15] He separated the discipline of medicine from religion, believing and arguing that disease was not a punishment inflicted by the gods but rather the product of environmental factors, diet, and living habits.
Hippocrates’ reputation, and myths about his life and his family, began to grow in the Hellenistic period, about a century after his death. During this period, the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt collected for its library literary material from preceding periods in celebration of the past greatness of Greece. So far as it can be inferred, the medical works that remained from the Classical period (among the earliest prose writings in Greek) were assembled as a group and called the works of Hippocrates. Technical medical science developed in the Hellenistic period and after. Surgery, pharmacy, and anatomy advanced; physiology became the subject of serious speculation; and philosophic criticism improved the logic of medical theories. Competing schools in medicine (first Empiricism and later Rationalism) claimed Hippocrates as the origin and inspiration of their doctrines.
Hippocrates is famous because:
he systematised medicine
he founded antiquity’s greatest school of physicians
he invented the famous Hippocratic Oath
he and his followers wrote a large body of medical literature
Some of the successes of the Hippocratic School were:
attributing diseases to natural rather than supernatural causes
treating diseases through rational reasoning rather than magic or sacrifices to gods
identifying that environment, diet, and lifestyle can contribute to ill-health
emphasising kindness, gentleness, and cleanliness in treatments
ensuring practitioners operated in a professional way, including keeping medical records for each patient
prognosis – detailed record-keeping for many patients enabled physicians to know the likely path an illness would take