Hippocrates (460-c 356 BC) and the founding of perinatal medicine.

Knowledge of the life of Hippocrates is mainly based on tradition and on biographies written many centuries after his death. It appears that he was born in 460 BC on the island of Cos, near the western coast ofAsia Minor to a physician Heraclides and his wife Phaenarete. Except that he was of short stature, we have to rely on later Roman sculptures for an idea as to his appearance. He was taught medicine by his father who is said to have traced his ancestry back to Asclepius. After his father's death Hippocrates moved to Athens to study with the sophist Gorgis and the philosopher Democritus. Athens was then the cultural centre of the Greek city states and his contemporaries included Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Euripides, Sophocles, Phidas, and Aristotle. After completing his training Hippocrates travelled widely as an itinerant physician visiting Thrace, Thessaly, Delos and many parts of Greece, and became famous for his predictions, cures, and teaching. Subsequently Athens honoured him for his part in checking the great plague that broke out in 430 BC and, also, for declining an invitation from Artaxerxes, Great King of Persia, to become his court physician. Eventually, Hippocrates returned to Cos, the most renowned doctor of his day. He is said to have died in Thessaly at a great age and to be buried between Gyrton and Larissa. I During his lifetime the medical school on Cos had become the most famous in Greece and, after his death, his sons Thessalus and Dracon and numerous disciples continued to practice the art he had taught them. However, later in the 4th century Alexandria took over the lead in Greek medicine and the Hippocratic collection of some 72 books and 59 treatises was transferred there. Written in the Ionic dialect in an assortment of styles, it is not possible to say which were written by Hippocrates, though Francis Adams, a country physician from the village of Banchory in Scotland, attempted to do so in 1849.2 Hippocrates has deservedly been called the Father of Medicine. He raised a craft based on superstition and linked with the priesthood to a noble professional art and science that relied on clinical observation and experience. He taught that the ph'ysician's primary duty was to his patient and developed ethical standards, encapsulated in the Hippocratic oath, that have never been superseded. Wisdom, humility, and love of humanity shine through his writings. He Z 's~~~~~~~1