Hippocrates

Hippocrates practiced and taught medicine on the island of Kos in the fifth century BCE. The Hippocratic Corpus, roughly sixty texts written by him and later physicians working in his tradition, argues that disease has natural, bodily causes to be found through observation of the patient rather than the will of the gods, and records case histories that track symptoms day by day. Little is reliably known of his own life; the physician's oath that carries his name was likely composed after his lifetime, but the naturalistic, observational method credited to him shaped Western medicine for two thousand years.