Hippocrates
Is a doctor standing in for the gods?
That time, that place
On the island of Kos stood a school of healing. In those days the sick mostly went to a temple of Asclepius, slept a night there, and waited for the god to appear in a dream and cure them. Illness came from the gods.
Why this question
Among the writings of the Hippocratic school is one on the so-called sacred disease — epilepsy. People called it possession by a god. The text contradicts them head-on: this illness has natural causes like any other, and we call it sacred only because we do not know what those causes are.
What was found
That changes what a doctor does. Observation instead of prayer. See the patient daily and write it down by date: when the fever rises, how they sleep, how they breathe. Know the road an illness travels and you can guess what comes next.
And a principle is set: above all, do no harm. Meaning that when you do not know, it is better not to act. A medicine that begins by admitting its own ignorance.
Illness was a punishment sent by gods
Case records tracking each patient day by day
Yet the same school's theory of four humors produced two thousand years of bloodletting