the sixty pieces of writing that are attributed to him and his followers
(though by some estimates, almost half are falsely attributed), contains
works that were probably written over a century or two. John Block
concluded, “Hippocrates first gave the physician an independent standing,
separating him from the cosmological speculator. Hippocrates confined
the medical man to medicine.”^6 All early “healers” were natural
philosophers, and Aristotle said that it was the task of these philosophers
to look into the principles of health and disease. This started with an
obsession with the “correct regimen” and proper diet. “How to find the
diet that would maintain the body in health and free it from disease was a
problem that invited speculation about the constituents of body and of
food, as well as about the structure, the functions and the activities of the
body and its parts.”^7
The ancient truth-seekers mulled over the function of the body without
any knowledge of cells, germs, genes, cancer, even bodily organs; is it any
wonder that disease was a complete enigma? If primitive man in every
corner of the world was transfixed with the starry sky, found meaning in
the mutable moon, contemplated the traversing of the sun, and considered
the pulsing of the tides and respirations of the winds, how much more
significance would be achieved by turning inward to our bodies and
examining the motions, ebbs and flows of a pounding heart, of breathing,
even urination and defecation?
Siddhartha Mukherjee, in The Emperor of All Maladies, says the ancient
Greeks were “preoccupied with fluid mechanics—with waterwheels,
pistons, valves, chambers, and sluices—a revolution in hydraulic science
originating with irrigation and canal-digging and culminating with
Archimedes discovering his eponymous principle of buoyancy in his
bathtub. This preoccupation with hydraulics also flowed into Greek
medicine and pathology. To explain illness—all illness—Hippocrates
fashioned an elaborate doctrine based on fluids and volumes, which he
freely applied to pneumonia, boils, dysentery, and hemorrhoids.”^8
Hippocrates, and later, his disciple Galen, would explain the inner
workings and dysfunction of the body with the concept of the Four
Humors (liquids). Thinking like a hydraulic engineer, Hippocrates
theorized that our bodily vessel is a container of blood, phlegm, black bile,
and yellow bile. “In the process of digestion, food and drink are turned
into the bodily juices, the humors,” writes Owsei Temkin, “... they are the