You’ve probably heard of the Greek physician Hippocrates, the man considered to be the father of Western healing and the first advocate for the rational study of disease. From him we get the “Hippocratic Oath” – a vow taken by all allopathic physicians as a commitment to “first, do no harm” to the patients they treat.
Hippocrates and his students took the study of medicine and healing beyond the cultural incantations practiced in their day and laid the groundwork for science in the practice of medicine. They believed that disease originated in natural rather than supernatural causes and that these causes could be rationally explained.
Hippocrates renounced magic and angry gods as the source of disease as was previously believed. In a radical departure from the status quo, he taught that natural causes of disease could be accurately deduced from a patient’s symptomology. He also advocated nature’s ability to heal illness and restore proper health to the individual. “Nature heals disease,” he wrote in his explanation of an inner source of healing. “Inherent mechanisms act automatically… for nature is active without training and without schooling in the essentials.” His maxim would later be expressed as a basic precept of early Western medicine: vis medicatrix naturae, meaning “the healing power of nature.”
Hippocrates taught his physicians to not focus on disease only but to study the whole patient, including their environment, their emotional state and the spiritual beliefs they preferred before prescribing a course of action. “Observe the nature of each,” he wrote, “the diet, customs, age, speech, even his silence, his thoughts, if he sleeps well or is suffering from lack of sleep.” A doctor must be familiar with these signs to properly diagnose and treat the patient’s condition, he said.
According to Hippocrates and other Greek physicians, a life force energy called pneuma flowed within and through every person. When the pneuma was strong, the patient was most able to fend off the natural causes of disease; if it was weak, the patient was vulnerable to suffer with the symptoms of illness.
Interesting, halfway around the world this concept had already been the focus of medical treatment for centuries. Physicians in China and India had long since rejected magical explanations for disease in favor of natural causes, and like the Greeks, they understood health as a balance of natural forces. They also subscribed to the notion of a life force energy, called prana by the Indians and chi by the Chinese, which was understood as the essence which heals disease when properly facilitated and balanced.
The observation of a natural source of inner healing arose independently in cultures on separate continents, and the synchronicity suggests a core concept – there is a natural healing source flowing within us, integrative with the human body, a form of energy that affects the material elements, tissues, and systems that our bodies are made of.