Hippocrates

Hello. My name is Hippocrates. I lived a very, very long time ago, around the year 460 BCE. My home was a beautiful Greek island called Kos, which was surrounded by sparkling blue water. My father was a doctor, and I always watched him as he helped people. Even when I was a young boy, I was very curious about the human body. I wanted to understand exactly why people got sick, like why they would get a cough or a tummy ache. I knew that if I could understand the reason, I could find a better way to help them feel well again.

In my time, most people believed that sickness was a punishment from the gods. If someone felt ill, they thought it was because a god was angry with them. But I had a completely different idea, which was new to everyone. I thought that illnesses had natural causes that we could understand by looking closely at the world and at our bodies. I didn't think it was magic. So, I started to work in a new way. I would sit with my patients and carefully watch them. I listened to all of their problems and paid attention to their breathing and whether they felt warm. I used my mind to think like a detective, searching for clues to figure out what was really making them sick. This was a brand new approach to medicine.

I believed that being a doctor was a very special job that required more than just knowledge. I taught my students that it was most important for doctors to be kind, trustworthy, and to always do their best for the people they care for. To help them remember this, I came up with a special promise for all my students to follow. Today, that promise is known as the Hippocratic Oath. It is a guide for doctors to be good and ethical, to keep their patients' secrets safe, and to always focus on healing. This is a tradition that has continued for thousands of years, and doctors today still make a similar promise.

I lived a long and full life, to be about 90 years old, and I spent my years teaching and healing many people. Today, I am remembered as the 'Father of Medicine.' That is because my ideas about looking for the natural causes of sickness helped change the way people think about health. My work of carefully observing patients helped pave the way for modern science and all the wonderful doctors and treatments that exist in the world now.