Hippocrates: Quotes about diseases

Hippocrates was ancient Greek physician. Explore interesting quotes on disease.
Hippocrates: 66   quotes 34   likes

“As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.”

Hippocrates

Epidemics, Book I, Ch. 2, Full text online at Wikisource
Variant translation: The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.
Paraphrased variants:
Wherever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
Viking Book of Aphorisms : A Personal Selection (1988) by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger, p. 213.

Disease , Help

“[A]ll the causes of the sufferance refer themselves to this rule, that the strongest things most especially and decidedly hurt man, whether in health or in disease.”

Hippocrates

p, 125
Ancient Medicine

Health , Disease , Suffering , Hurt

“Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable.”

Hippocrates

7:87
Variant translation: What cannot be cured by medicaments is cured by the knife, what the knife cannot cure is cured with the searing iron, and whatever this cannot cure must be considered incurable.
Aphorisms

Disease

“For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.”

Hippocrates

1:6; Variant translations:
Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases. Compare: "A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy", Guy Fawkes, in admitting to the Gunpowder Plot; "Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved, / Or not at all", William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act iv, Scene 3; "For a desperate disease a desperate cure", Michel de Montaigne, The Custom of the Isle of Cea, Chapter iii.
Aphorisms

Disease