The wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine.
HippocratesIt is more important to know the person who has the condition than it is to know the condition the person has.
HippocratesAnd he will manage the cure best who has foreseen what is to happen from the present state of matters.
HippocratesIf someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him.
HippocratesThe chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
HippocratesIt is changes that are chiefly responsible for diseases, especially the greatest changes, the violent alterations both in the seasons and in other things. (:)...regimen and temperature, and one period of life to another.
HippocratesThe physician must have at his command a certain ready wit, as dourness is repulsive both to the healthy and the sick.
HippocratesI also maintain that clear knowledge of natural science must be acquired, in the first instance, through mastery of medicine alone.
HippocratesWe must turn to nature itself, to the observations of the body in health and in disease to learn the truth.
HippocratesAnd if this were so in all cases, the principle would be established, that sometimes conditions can be treated by things opposite to those from which they arose, and sometimes by things like to those from which they arose.
HippocratesIt's far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.
HippocratesFat people who want to reduce should take their exercise on an empty stomach and sit down to their food out of breath.... Thin people who want to get fat should do exactly the opposite and never take exercise on an empty stomach.
HippocratesWhere prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.
HippocratesThe brain of man, like that of all animals is double, being parted down its centre by a thin membrane. For this reason pain is not always felt in the same part of the head, but sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, and occasionally all over.
HippocratesIn acute diseases the physician must conduct his inquiries in the following way. First he must examine the face of the patient, and see whether it is like the faces of healthy people, and especially whether it is like its usual self. Such likeness will be the best sign, and the greatest unlikeness will be the most dangerous sign. The latter will be as follows. Nose sharp, eyes hollow, temples sunken, ears cold and contracted with their lobes turned outwards, the skin about the face hard and tense and parched, the colour of the face as a whole being yellow or black.
HippocratesI have clearly recorded this: for one can learn good lessons also from what has been tried but clearly has not succeeded, when it is clear why it has not succeeded.
Hippocrates