Commentaries on Hippocrates

Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.

-Hippocrates

Lister recorded reading 'Hippocratis Aph ffermij Comment' on 26 February 1663/4. This book could have been one of several editions of commentaries by Galen or later medieval writers about Hippocrates' Aphorisms.   The doctrines of Hippocrates underwent a strong revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly his Airs, Waters, and Places; several physicians such as Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), the so-called 'English Hippocrates', attempted to find the relationship between weather, climate, the environment and health, particularly as factors in the formation and spread of epidemic disease. ¹

Sydenham instituted a new observational approach to study the correlations between disease and weather based on Baconian empirical induction and the experimental program of natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle.  ² According to Sydenham, atmospheric changes and climatic change created specific epidemic 'constitutions'. ³  He thought that there were five phenomena worthy of sustained attention: 'heat, cold, moisture, dryness, and emanations from the earth or from living bodies. The first four factors represented the atmospheric constitution, the fifth factor the environmental constitution'. ⁴ Plague was linked to the 'environmental constitution', and other diseases like fever to an 'atmospheric constitution'. ⁵

Image

Lister would come to agree  with the precepts of neo-Hippocratic revival, later doing  his own investigations into the effects of exceptionally cold weather on health. In March 1684, he presented a preliminary paper to the Royal Society investigating the effects of the severe cold on health, particularly the beneficial effects that Hippocrates postulated. ⁶

1. See David Cantor, ed., Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 
2. James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (New York:  Macmillan, 1987), 9. 
3. Matthias Heymann, 'The Evolution of Climate Ideas and Knowledge', Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1,4 (2010), 581-597, on 585. 
4. Heymann, 'Evolution of Climate', 585. 
5. Riley, Campaign, 11. 
6. Martin Lister, 'A Discourse Concerning the Rising and Falling of the Quicksilver in the Barometer', Philosophical Transactions 14 (1684), 790-94.