Hippocrates

Despite Hippocrates' very first exhortation, the history of medicine abounds in needless torture and bad counsel.

Hippocrates in 400 BC said that exercise is man's best medicine, but his message has been lost over time and we are an increasingly sedentary society.

A drug like aspirin is said to have been used in ancient Greece. More than two-thousand-four-hundred years ago, Hippocrates told his patients to ease pain by chewing the outer covering of the willow tree. The covering, called bark, contains the chemical salicylic acid.

The dialogue commences with a request on the part of Hippocrates that Socrates would introduce him to the celebrated teacher.

So, how did aspirin become so important? The story begins with a willow tree. Two thousand years ago, the Greek doctor Hippocrates advised his patients to chew on the bark and leaves of the willow. The tree contains the chemical salicin. In the 1800s, researchers discovered how to make salicylic acid from salicin. In 1897, a chemist named Felix Hoffmann at Friedrich Bayer and Company in Germany created acetyl salicylic acid. Later, it became the active substance in a medicine that Bayer called aspirin.

Hippocrates is known as the father of medicine.

The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates promoted wine for various purposes, including reducing fevers and dressing wounds.