What would Hippocrates Do?

What would Hippocrates Do?

     By Tara Parker-Pope

Lately, I’ve been reading a fascinating new book, “Hippocrates’ Shadow:  Secrets From the House of Medicine” (Simon & Schuster, 2008), which explores the entrenched subculture of doctors and medical practice.  Tje author, Dr. David H. Newman, is an emergency medicine physician at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York who was also deployed in Iraq in 2005.  The book focuses on the missteps of medern medicine, but it begins with a fascinating look back at where it all began.  Here is an excerpt.

By David H. Newman, M.D.

By today’s standards, Hippocrates was a profoundly abnormal physician.  Medicine’s founding father routinely tasted his patients’ urine, sampled their pus and earwax, and smelled and scrutinized their stool.  He assessed the stickiness of their sweat and examined their blood, their phlegm, their tears, and their vomit.  He became closely acquainted with their general disposition, family, and home, and he studied their facial expressions.

In deciding upon a final diagnosis and treatment, Hippocrates recorded and considered dietary habits, the season, the local prevailing winds, the water supply at the patient’s residence, and the direction the home faced.  He absorbed everything, examining exhaustively and documenting meticulously.

Modern-day physicians often cringe or shake their heads when they hear descriptions of Hippocrates’ diagnostic methods; laypeople, however, have quote a different response - they wonder aloud at ow nice it might be to have Hippocrates as their doctor.