S09E01

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. For the next four episodes, we're hoisting our sail and voyaging to the Mediterranean shores of Ancient Greece, the setting of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. In the game, players go on an epic adventure across the Ancient Greek world in the turbulent time of the Peloponnesian War, when the city-state of Athens struggled for supremacy with the warrior kingdom of Sparta. Along the way, players can immerse themselves in the culture of that world and meet some of the people who have profoundly influenced Western culture forever. To shed light on the real history behind the game, we'll be exploring the craggy coastlines and hidden nooks where mythical heroes Democracy and Medicine were born. Today, we're uncovering the life and works of one man in particular. Let's go meet him. The murmur of the waves is soothing, like the shushing of a bay by its mother as she settles it to sleep. But the glorious sunshine and warm sea wind keep you awake. You can taste the salt from the sea spray in the air and the call of sea birds transports you back in time to fond memories of summer's past. When you look down from the cliff top on which you stand at the azure sea below, you could swear that you can feel the lapping of the water on your toes. This Mediterranean idyll seems like all you could ever need. Suddenly your daydream is interrupted by the sound of anguish. A moan of pain stings your ears. It's as if the tormented souls of Tartarus have been unleashed into your paradise and they are close at hand. You follow the cries to discover what's wrong. Cautiously creeping over the hilltop, you encounter some strangers in the distinctive garb of a religious sect. When they see you, they warn you not to go any further. There is no danger, they say. No danger to you anyway. The screams of agony you can hear belong to a person whose fate was decided by the gods and should remain so. Something in the tone of their voices suggests that they're displeased with someone who disagrees with them. Curious, you proceed to the source of the sound. To your surprise, you find the sufferer lying on a bed in a space full of the sick and ailing. It's a temple of healing and the patient's attended by a middle aged man with a full beard and a kind countenance. He speaks gently to his patients, examines them carefully and advises them on the simple lifestyle choices they can make to improve their health. When it comes to the screaming patient, however, this wise man deliberately prepares some specialist surgical tools. This case requires intervention. After his work is completed, he thoroughly sterilises his hands and the patient. The surgery has clearly made a difference and the patient is no longer in agony, but he calmly reminds them that the healing process has only just begun. You introduce yourself and his gentle gaze passes over you. You can tell he's looking for what ails you. Satisfied that you're not actually ill, he returns your greeting with a curt reply. He is Hippocrates and he is busy. Assassin's Creed Odyssey introduces us to Hippocrates as a man ahead of his time, fighting the traditions of religious superstition as he pioneers the science of medicine. How true is this representation of arguably history's greatest physician? What exactly do we know about the real man? And how relevant is his legacy in the 21st century? To answer these questions and more, I'm speaking to Professor Helen King of the Open University. Her book Hippocrates now examines the myths surrounding ancient medicine and Hippocrates himself. Her upcoming book Immaculate Forms details the complex history of medical treatment of the female body from ancient Greece to the modern day. Welcome to Echoes of History, Helen. Fantastic to have you here. Lovely to be asked. I'm very much looking forward to finding out more about Hippocrates. I vaguely know the name. As a medieval historian, I know nothing about the man, so I'm fascinated to find out more. The first thing I wanted to ask you was maybe a technical point. So in the game, Hippocrates is spelt with a K, but more often I see it spelt with a C. Is there a reason for that difference? Yeah, so the original would be a K. So the Greek letter is a kappa. It's a K and it's pronounced the K hard sound and they don't really have a C. So K's come out of C's when you sort of Latinise it and then when you put it into other European languages. Having it with a K is kind of posh. It's like saying, Ooh, I'm really Greek. It's the classy way to do it. It always looks a bit weird if people have never seen it before they're used to the C. There you go, Ubisoft being classy with a K. And I guess I have to be very careful here as well, because having grown up watching Bill and Ted, I'm always tempted to call him Hippocrates and I need to avoid doing that. Definitely Hippocrates. And I guess most people will know the name Hippocrates. They may know of the Hippocratic Oath. Famously, doctors swear to do no harm to anybody else. But what do we actually know about Hippocrates, the man? Do we know kind of roughly when he's born? What do we know about his life? Oh, we're talking big void here. I mean, just for starters, you know, the Hippocrates wrote the oath thing. There's an oath. It's in ancient Greek. It comes from maybe the time when Hippocrates is supposed to have lived, which is about 460 to 370 BC. But whether there's any connection between the two, the man, the text, really don't know. The reason why we've got those dates 460 to 370 is because there are a couple of references to Hippocrates in the philosopher Plato. Plato just sort of drops the name like, you know, you all know who Hippocrates is. He taught medicine for a fee. That's one of the things he says. And he believed that to understand the whole, you need to understand the parts or to understand the parts, you need to understand the whole, whatever that means. And that's it. But those dialogues of Plato are set in that period sort of from 460 onwards. So one set in 433-ish, that's Plato's Protagoras, and that would make probably Hippocrates' twenties at that point. So famous enough to be known to people. And then the other one set a few years later than that. So suggesting that everyone just knows the name. They might not know anything about him, but they know the name Hippocrates. So the name has always been very famous since Plato mentions him. Sounds like he lived to a ripe old age as well. If you thought to have been around between those dates, we're getting into old age by the time he potentially passed away. Yeah, we are. And if you look at the history of people writing the Well-Riffy of Hippocrates, which is something that's based on absolutely no facts. It's just, let's write a biography of a doctor. What would he be like? Where would he have worked? What would he have done? Using the Hippocratic texts. So if they mention a particular town, you can say, oh, Hippocrates obviously went there. But that's making the assumption that text is actually about the real Hippocrates. There's lots of assumptions going on. So you can sort of put together places and events and things and suggest that that's his life. But people who do that also have to speculate on his age. And you've got people who say he lived till he was 95. You've got people who say he lived till he was over 100. Because obviously, if he's the best doctor in the human race, he's got to have been quite long lived, hasn't he? Yeah, physician heal thyself and all of that kind of thing. What are our main sources then for where we think we're getting close to Hippocrates? You mentioned Plato then. Who else is writing about him? And how certain can we be that they're actually talking about Hippocrates? It sounds promising because they're talking about a doctor definitely in Plato. It's someone who taught medicine for a fee. So we know it's a doctor. We've also got Aristotle, similar sort of date, writing that Hippocrates was great in name, but not in stature, suggesting that people sort of knew what he looked like. He wasn't that big a guy. But that's it really for contemporary sources. So what you have is mostly the actual texts of ancient Greek medicine assumed ought to have been written by Hippocrates. So incidentally, that would probably cover about 200 years. So if he did live that long, he really was doing well. But they have different slants on them. So some of them are quite conversational, some of them are lists of facts, things you need to look for in a patient. Some of them are quite theoretical. Some of them are lists of remedies, lots of different types of thing, and different styles and also different theories. That's rather worrying, isn't it? So Hippocrates changed his mind on a daily basis. There isn't a Hippocratic theory of medicine. There's a sort of general thing about observation, empirical evidence, being with patients, seeing what they feel like. There's even a description of someone dying where they talk about touching the feet to sort of see if they're cold or not. This is someone who's quite hands on with patients, or if it's not one person, it's lots of people who are hands on with patients. But in terms of actual factual stuff, like he was born in this place, he died there, there really isn't anything. It's all based on later conjectures, particularly when people want to have Hippocrates associated with their hometown. So you tell a story about him being there because it sounds good, doesn't it? Mason We also have this collection of writing which is attributed to Hippocrates. I get in the sense we need to be very careful about whether any, never mind all of that, could be attributed to Hippocrates at all. Is there a sense that there's a period where medicine is developing and evolving and what everyone is doing is conflating what's going on into this one single figure for convenience, maybe? I think that's a really good way of looking at it. There is something going on in sort of science generally in that period, sort of late fifth century into the fourth century. An interest in observing the world, as I say, and seeing what's happening and trying to get rules from that, trying to look at examples and then come up with a rule that covers all those examples. And you get that sense very clearly in the Hippocratic writings that they're accumulating individual cases, things they've seen, and then trying to come to some sort of conclusion. Why does that always happen? Why, if this factor exists with that factor, is the outcome always death? That sort of thing. So I think there is a genuine sort of scientific revolution going on in this period. And these texts are part of that, whoever wrote them. Mason Is there a sense that potentially Hippocrates may not have been responsible for all of these things, but he's the most famous person, so all of this is hung around him a little bit? Why is he the name that we remember? Well, it's because he's in Plato. So Plato, everybody knows Plato. Plato has been used in schools for years and years. He's part of the education system through many, many centuries. So because he's in Plato, he's therefore got the reality factor. But the actual texts, there's still nothing to identify any one of them as bi-Hippocrates. None of them are signed. And there's a theory, which is a really good theory, that it's all to do with a librarian at the Great Library of Alexandria who would have accumulated all these various medical texts. I don't know if you know about the way Alexandria worked, but according to the stories about it, they would confiscate books from anyone arriving at the port in Egypt and they copy them and then give back the copies and keep the originals. So they could have been building up these texts. And whenever the librarian got another medical, it's like, oh, medicine has got to be Hippocrates, doesn't it? So you file it onto Hippocrates and then you end up with this huge amount of stuff, maybe 70 treatises, maybe more. It's hard to know sometimes if two of them are part one and part two of the same thing, or if one is just a fragment and we've lost the rest, quite messy. But it all ended up being under Hippocrates. So Hippocrates gets even more great because he wrote all this stuff, but he didn't. I mean, I'm sure he'd be very pleased to learn that he's been credited with all of this kind of thing though, even if it's by accident. We also have this popular image when we think of what Hippocrates might have looked like. He's this kindly wise old man with a big long beard. I mean, not dissimilar, I guess, to Christian ideals of God. He's that fatherly figure, that reverential figure, the kindly looking old man. Do we have any idea what he might have looked like? How close that could have been? No, no idea at all. It's the dominant image. And certainly it fits with what you want Hippocrates to be. And a lot of this is about what you want him to be. People later, centuries later, going back who knew nothing about him, say, oh, his eyes were just sort of so caring and kind, but so perceptive. He could really see what was going on. And he always has a furrowed brow, like he's having a really good think, or maybe he's feeling really, really sorry for a patient. And it's that sort of things that look like you're caring, that you're thoughtful. In other words, the visual image of Hippocrates is reflecting what people think the texts are saying about what a doctor should be, the ideal doctor. So yes, he is like God or Santa Claus without the hat. But there's also some very weird things going on there. So there's this thing about his baldness, which does feature in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, don't mention the baldness. He is bald. Now, is that a good thing in a doctor? Wouldn't you think a doctor might have a surefire remedy for baldness? So throughout the history of looking at Hippocrates, so 2000 years plus, people have said, well, you know, he was bald, but he did try to cure it. He had this remedy for baldness. And you will find this remedy on the internet today. It's being used to say, look, this is Hippocrates recipe for baldness. It didn't work. But Helen's amazing baldness remedy will do the thing Hippocrates didn't. So it's like the one thing he couldn't do, this one failure was to cure his own baldness. And the remedy is fab. If you like a good ancient remedy, I'm in need of a good baldness remedies. I've got my pain. I think you're at an early stage there, but you never know, you might need this. So it's pigeon droppings. Now pigeon droppings sounds bad, but they believe that pigeon droppings, one of the only sorts of dung that didn't smell that bad. So it's sort of nice dung. That sounded okay. Nice dung. So you want nice dung, i.e. pigeon droppings. Cumin, so nice sort of herby spicy thing. And some nettles, stinging nettles, maybe rose petals. And this recipe turns up again and again through the history of looking at Hippocrates. But what I find fascinating is it actually does come from a real Hippocratic text, but it's not a recipe for male pattern baldness. It comes from one of the gynecological texts. So it's really not aimed at men at all. And somehow that became Hippocrates remedy for hair loss that he used to use himself. Weirdly arrived at that. I presume, well, maybe that features in your book, Immaculate Forms. Yep. I have a book coming out in September on the history of looking at the female body. Well, I'm not doing hair actually, except for a bit where I've got something on hairy breasts. There is a Hippocratic remedy for hairy breasts, but that wasn't the problem Hippocrates had. It sounds a little bit then like his appearance, similar to his writings, is a case of everybody putting all of these things that we think would make someone look like a good doctor into a bucket, shaking them up. And this image of Hippocrates fall out. So he's thoughtful, he's got kind eyes, he looks like he knows what he's doing, he's wise, all of those kinds of things. And like his writing, we're creating this single person as a repository for all of the things that were going on during this period. I think that's absolutely right. And not even just what's going on in the period, but what we all want now. So today you'll still find people saying what we want is a doctor like Hippocrates. That's the sort of guy we want. And it's often a reaction against what people perceive as the shortcomings of the medicine around them. So if you think the problem with medicine today is you don't get very long with your doctor, then you focus on Hippocrates, a bedside manner, sitting there with you, observing you for a long period of time, asking you questions, thinking about the answers, rather than just five minutes you're in, you're out. So it's very much about what you want medicine to be and how Hippocrates is somehow the ideal doctor that we all really need. He's the GP that your nan remembers having when she was growing up kind of thing. What is Hippocratic medicine in a nutshell? What were the kinds of things that whoever this group of people that we're going to call Hippocrates were preaching? What was it and how was it different from what was otherwise about at the time? It was very much based on natural causes, not on religion. That's not to say that Hippocrates and the Hippocratic corpus or whatever rejected the gods. They didn't. The treatise on the sacred disease talks specifically about how something which we identify as probably epilepsy was not due to the gods choosing someone to strike down, but was due to totally natural causes, in this case, phlegm, cold fluid in the head that was somehow getting stuck. So there's very much the idea that the body is responsible. You don't need to look outside the body. And then that means that you can treat the body without having to go outside the body. So you don't need to involve religion. That's not to say that religion wasn't still there. Hippocratic medicine exists alongside the temples of the healing god Asclepius and other gods and goddesses who had a healing function for particular parts of the body. But you didn't need to do that. You just needed to balance your body. I think balance is a very important word. Hippocratic medicine talks a lot about fluids in the body which are sort of swooshing around. And you need to make sure that you don't have too much of one fluid and not enough of another. And you can adjust your fluids by your diet, which is actually a broader word in Greek that it is in our English language. It means not just food and drink, but also exercise, your sleeping patterns and so on. So the whole health thing. So you can rebalance your body with the aid of a doctor who can tell you what you're doing wrong. So doctors are sort of like personal trainers. They don't just give you a remedy because this is pre obviously pre antibiotics, pre anything like that. They give you a program of diet and exercise and so on. Lifestyle changes that will get you better. So it's about natural causes. And it all comes from the body. And it's about balancing. And you can do that yourself if you've got a doctor to help you understand what you're doing wrong. It sounds an awful lot like a lot of things you might hear on the internet today when people talk about you know, if you just make this simple lifestyle change, everything will be a lot better. Most of us would probably frown at things like that. I wonder whether Hippocrates and his fellows were getting a similar reaction then that you know, there are a bunch of quacks who are coming up with these weird ideas about medicine. Yeah, the bunch of quacks thing is fascinating. Obviously, you always want to be the person who's calling someone else a quack, don't you? And Hippocratic certainly do that. They talk about people who come along with daft theories in their view, like, you know, don't go to bed with your left leg on top of your right leg or something like that. Don't sleep with a goat's skin on top of you and you'll be okay. So lots of these things were around. And I think it's quite possible that they would have been seen as just as daft as that. But of course, they're generally not going for a sort of one size fits all medicine, it's much more personalized. Again, that's quite modern, isn't it? Personalized medicine. So they're not saying everyone needs to eat more, whatever. They're saying if you are someone whose body is this sort of body, and if you find you're getting these symptoms, then you should maybe restrict your intake of that thing and add a bit more of this thing and do a bit more walking but not in cold weather. And it gets much more all inclusive than just eat this food. So today, one of the big things that gets discussed on the internet about Hippocrates is the claim that he said, let food be thy medicine. I love the way it's always thy medicine, it makes it sound sort of old fashioned and therefore must be right, mustn't it? And people use that to say, you should all be eating food number, whatever, all be eating liver, all be eating particular herb, there's even a Hippocrates juice recipe out there today, there's Hippocrates soup. None of this is in the ancient Greek texts. It's the sort of thing you think Hippocrates would have liked. It's quite weird the way people think like this. But the food thing, it's not actually saying one food cures everything. What the Hippocrates would say is, depending on your individual makeup, and the time of the year, and the climate you live in, and all that, you should maybe have a bit more of this food and a bit less of that food. So it's a lot more balanced than some of the people who claim things about Hippocrates today. Yeah, it sounds like the revolutionary part of what they're thinking is that a lot of health and well being is an internal thing that is specific to an individual's body. There are external factors, and that's not to deny the role of the gods in ancient Greek culture and things like that as well. But there's much more of a focus on what's happening inside you. And as you say, your specifics so that medicine can be tailored to your individual needs and requirements to find that balance again for you. And that seems quite different to the idea that most of these were external factors, often afflictions from the gods. Yes, it is. And it makes it difficult when certain things happen though. So of course, the big problem here is something like an epidemic disease where everyone gets the same disease, then you can't say, well, it's because of your individual balance and so on. And that was always a problem. Hippocratic medicine would not have been good on COVID. If everyone's getting the same thing, what do you do with that? So there was the great plague which hit Athens in 431 BC. So during the lifetime of Hippocrates, there were various theories there about it was the gods, but also theories like it was poison that the Spartan enemy had been poisoning the wells, because that would give you a good explanation. But you couldn't really use Hippocratic medicine effectively to explain epidemic diseases. However, while we're at that, one of the great achievements of Hippocrates was allegedly to try curing the plague, which is a great example is that you've got a famous person, you've got a famous event, they happen at the same time, so they must have been connected. So he must have had a go. The way he's supposed to have cured the plague, and this again is much later stories, centuries later created about it. The way he cured it was supposedly he lit bonfires, because he thought that the air quality would be improved by lighting bonfires. And you think, okay, that is a rather different view of air pollution to what we have today. And slightly, it odds with the idea that all of this stuff is individual and internal. It's a strange juxtaposition to all of that, to think you can light a fire and it'll cure disease in a group of people. Exactly, because you've got a disease that clearly isn't really about individual change. But then you've got a theory that makes absolutely no sense to us as to why you do that. But of course, it's a story, it's the idea that he must have done something. And so if disease can be caused by bad air, and bad air is another one of those interesting things that you can use to explain causes of epidemics. So the word we have miasma, miasma means basically bad air. There's lots of explanations for how changes in the air could affect people, regardless of their individual makeup. So if you think maybe there's something in the air that you can't see, perhaps the answer is to light bonfires, which you can see, and that will somehow purify the air. But I think that's just showing how epidemic diseases that affect lots of people at the same time was something that was quite difficult for actual Hippocratic medicine to explain away. It's still confounded even this new thinking. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. And on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm looking for answers to the big questions about every aspect of life in the early modern period. Like, how did the memory of Anne Boleyn continue to influence the court of her daughter, Elizabeth I? How were fairies brought to life on the Elizabethan stage? And how did the arrival of male-only doctors threaten the lives of women? In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week, every week. Subscribe now, and follow me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And I guess with my medievalist head on, I would suggest or understand that Hippocratic idea of, particularly the Four Humours, you know, so blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, it survives for a surprising amount of time, for something that we would today recognise as not true. It becomes the basis of medicine for a couple of millennia? Yes, that's a fair comment. So that's mostly because of Galen. So Galen, the great Roman Empire doctor, second century AD, doctor to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the royal family, and the most prolific writer of antiquity. I mean, he just wrote pages every day of his life. Galen saw himself as a sort of new version of Hippocrates 600 years on. And Galen looked at the Hippocratic corpus and was very aware that it didn't really match up. You couldn't say one person written all of this. So he picked the bits he liked the best and said, ah, those are the genuine ones Hippocrates wrote. And one of those was a treatise called On the Nature of Man. And there's a section of that which Galen said was genuine, real Hippocrates, other bits of it he thought were a bit fake. But the bit he liked was the bit with the four humours. So that's why it becomes the really dominant part of Hippocratic medicine that goes on, as you say, for centuries and centuries, for millennia. So other theories in the Hippocratic corpus about disease, like it's all to do with the balance of fire and water in the body, they went out the window and it all was four humours. So Hippocratic medicine is about more than four humours. But at the same time, that is one of the theories that was around. And it's because of Galen, it becomes the Hippocratic theory, because we all want to have Hippocrates on our team. I'm just imagining Galen sitting there with his red pen going through everything is like, nope, nope, nope, we'll keep that that will be Hippocrates genuine teachings, because I quite like that. So the Galen stamp of approval means that these things are adopted for centuries that follow. I won't say arbitrarily, because clearly Galen is a doctor as well, who will be reading this with some knowledge. But you know, he's almost unilaterally deciding the course of Western medicine for 1000 odd years after himself. Yeah, I think that's a very fair comment. And he tried all sorts of other little theories along the way. So if you had a bit of Hippocratic writing that looked okay, but not as good as the bits he wanted to be genuine, you can say, well, that's Hippocrates grandson or something writing that. And then you have Hippocrates his dodgy son-in-law. So anything you didn't like, oh, that's his dodgy son-in-law trying to get into the family business and writing his own really bad medical texts. So all sorts of ways of dividing up this massive texts in order to get what you want. I like that Hippocrates, Hippocrates junior and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, very strange way of addressing it. They did repeat their names, you know, grandsons were often named after their grandfathers. So it's by Hippocrates, which one? Just thinking back to the time of Hippocrates a little bit. And obviously, in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, people encounter Hippocrates and they deal with this huge figure who is viewed as the father of medicine. But do we have a sense of what operating as a doctor might have been like during this period, during the Peloponnesian War period? Are we talking about people who sit in a surgery, as we would expect a doctor to now? Or are they traveling with armies or both? At this period, they're mostly traveling. The texts call the epidemics, which is seven different volumes of epidemics, some of which are more associated with the real Hippocrates than others historically, you know, like the good ones. These describe doctors wandering around the Greek world. And you turn up in a town, it's more like a traveling quack in the medieval or early modern period. You turn up in a town, you say, Hello, I'm a doctor, people bring out their patients, you treat them, word gets around, more people bring out their patients, someone drops dead, you leave town rather rapidly. It can be like that. Armies could have doctors with them. In the Roman period, there were also doctor surgeries in some towns, some places would pay for a doctor to set up there because they thought doctors were so important. So there's quite a range of different ways of being a doctor. But the way he turns up in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, he's sort of being called out and doing various different things, I think that's quite accurate for how a doctor would be in that period. I mean, you've written a book as well, called Hippocrates Now. But, so, Holly, I have a copy just here. And I think you mentioned that that's available kind of open access as well. So anyone can get a copy of that if they want to. Yes, anyone can read it. It's through Bloomsbury Publishing, it's the company in Bloomsbury have something called Knowledge Unlatched KU. And you can get it through Knowledge Unlatched, you can read the whole thing online, no registration required, just go for it. Because I thought, I'd like this book to be out there so that people from different viewpoints could think, hang on, I've just read something online which says Hippocrates said walking is the best medicine. Did he say that? No. So this is where I can actually analyse it in some detail. So that sounds like a great resource for people to go and learn a whole load more about this topic than we're able to cover here. And obviously very generous to make that available for free as well. In terms of Hippocrates now, what would you consider to be the legacy or the legacies of Hippocrates? If we've spoken a little bit about a man who is probably a bucket for lots of different people's thinking and writing and teaching, and even what he looks like is kind of an amalgamation of an ideal doctor, and particularly lots of his teachings around the Four Humours and things like that are now disproved. Does he have a legacy today? He has a legacy because of being the first. There's something about being the father of medicine, a title which he gets pretty early on, only one father for medicine. So everybody, whether that's orthodox mainstream medicine or various alternative medicines, has seen the need over history to claim him as their ancestor too. Everyone wants to be in the Hippocrates family. It's like this is where real medicine is. It's an extraordinary legacy to have. And it's had an effect on ethics as well, so the sorts of questions that come up in Hippocratic texts, and indeed in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, like, do you treat your enemies, for example, or do you say, oh, that's my enemy, they can die. Do you treat bad people? Those are real medical ethical questions. And in the story of Hippocrates that grew up after his death, the legend of Hippocrates, at one point the King of Persia, Artaxerxes, is supposed to have sent him a letter saying, dear Hippocrates, got a very nasty plague going on in Persia. Could you come and cure it? And Hippocrates writes back and goes, no, you're the enemy. And then gets, well, yeah, but okay, Hippocrates, but how about if I gave you a lot of gold and the hand of my daughter in marriage? Would that do it? And Hippocrates is like, no, not curing the enemies of the Greeks. That's a very radical position. And when you think about things like war zones today, and about do you treat people who are your enemy? There's a lot of ethical issues which Hippocrates can play into there. And similarly, euthanasia, which again, features in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, do you kill somebody? Do you give someone drugs that will make them die? If you know, that's what they're going to do. And again, that's one that comes up in the Hippocratic Oath, which just keeps saying the Hippocratic Oath, like probably nothing to do with Hippocrates, but it got the name attached. The Oath says, I will not give a deadly medicine to anyone if asked for it. Now, does that mean if someone says, look, doctor, you've got the drugs, I can't stand this pain, I'm going to die anyway, give me the drugs now. Do you say, okay, here's the drugs? Is it even about euthanasia in that sense? Now, euthanasia is a fascinating word. It does have an ancient Greek origin. The eubit is good. And the thanasyr is from Thanatos death. It is the good death. But in ancient Greek terms, a good death is someone who dies in battle in their prime. That's good. So it's nothing like our idea of euthanasia, where you're at the end of things and you want to go more quickly. But the idea is also there that perhaps it's not about euthanasia. It's about the fact doctors have powerful drugs, which we know they do always have had. And we know that some drugs in a small dose will just make you sleepy. In a big dose, they'll put you into a coma. In a large dose, they'll kill you. We know that. And they knew that in the ancient Greek world too, clearly. And they talk about drugs, have substances and how much you should and shouldn't give. But what you do with that, if you're saying, I will not give a deadly drug to anyone, is that saying, you go along to the doctor, you say, Hippocrates got a bit of trouble with my mother-in-law. What are you going to do? Can you just say, well, okay, here's some drugs. Don't say I gave them to you. Or do you say, no, because I think these are deadly drugs. I don't think you should have them. Are you actually talking about doctors as accessories to murder, or doctors doing euthanasia? Or are you saying euthanasia is murder? And no one has the right to choose when they die. So these really big, big moral issues, and because they do all feature in the ancient Greek medical writings, Hippocrates comes in there too. He just can't keep out of these debates. And it's fascinating that those are still things that are going on today. Those are still discussions and debates. I loved watching MASH growing up. And there's always episodes of MASH where they're treating a Chinese soldier or something like that. And there's always the argument of do we treat a Chinese soldier? Is it our responsibility anyway? Those are still discussions that are happening today. And the euthanasia debate is ongoing still today. So potentially two and a half thousand years later, we've still not answered those questions satisfactory. So it sounds a little bit like Hippocrates having been this container for all of the wisdom of his age in medical terms, and this Mr. Potato Head of what a perfect doctor might look like, is now also a vehicle for all of the moral questions that we still have about medicine, that they're somehow still wrapped up in Hippocrates identity. Yes, I think that's right. And because of that father of medicine, he was the first thing. You really want him on your side, as I've said before, you want him on your side, no matter what the debate is. So currently, abortion, obviously big thing in America, particularly at the moment, restricting women's access to abortion. Again, people go back to the Hippocratic Oath, which has something in it about, I will not give a woman a pessary to acquire abortion. It actually says a pessary to destroy the fetus. But does that mean no abortion? Or does that mean not a pessary, not something you insert, because that might be too dangerous, that might damage the tissues, maybe if it was a drink, that would be okay. In other words, you can take the Hippocratic Oath on abortion, if that's what it's about there, to say ancient Greeks Hippocrates told them don't do it, or you can say some types of abortion were seen as more dangerous to the woman than others, and those were restricted. So even there, people want to say it's Hippocrates, people are always saying it's Hippocrates, and that's where I'm getting my authority from, which is kind of weird when you think quite how long ago we're talking about, we don't even know if any of these things were written by Hippocrates. Yeah, we're claiming some sort of authority from this father Christmas figure two and a half thousand years ago for kind of live debates that are happening today. And there is always that danger of interpretation, isn't there? Because it's a question of does Hippocrates say don't do this, or does he say don't do it this way? Actually, you can do it, just don't do it this way. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's always fraught. And it's always open to debate. Saying Hippocrates says doesn't actually close down debates, strangely, it leaves them open. So when people say, oh, well, but Hippocrates said dot, dot, dot, they're doing it as if it closes the debate down. But because of the range of texts, and the fact we don't know what he wrote anyway, it can never close it down completely. I can't help imagining this bald guy sitting there two and a half thousand years ago being told that we would be discussing him and his work and all of this stuff that is attributed to him today. And you know, scratching his bald head in utter bewilderment, that he's had such an impact, or that such an impact is kind of wrapped up in in his name. I mean, he can't possibly have believed in his own lifetime that this would happen. But clearly, he must have known that he was changing things, what he was doing, what he was teaching, what he was involved in was something revolutionary. Yes, I think that's right. Because the way that the texts are written is often quite first person. It's not sort of neutral. It's very much. But I say, it's quite a competitive culture, ancient Greece anyway, in so many ways, think of the Olympic Games for a start. It's a competitive place. And sometimes what you get in Hippocratic texts is whoever's writing them saying, some people think this and some people think that, but I say, it's this. And it's a but I say that is backed up with evidence. You know, I saw a case of a woman who dot dot dot, you know, that sort of thing. But nevertheless, it's but I say there is a very strong authorial ego in there. And I think that's important. These are people who have confidence in what they're saying, who are sure that they're right, and are prepared to argue their case and to assemble the evidence to get them there, whether that is accumulating lots of case histories of individual people, we have named individual case histories in the Hippocratic texts, we have day by day accounts of what happened to them, you know, on day one, they had a nasty cough and on day two, it was bleeding from the throat and on day four, on day five, they died. And they're not just writing this down because they want to write it down. They're writing it down because they want to understand, they want to understand what the patterns are, what it means. That's what's exciting these people, the fact that they've realized that there are patterns, and that their human knowledge and observation skills can give them access to the truth there. So there is something very exciting that's going on in these texts. And it sounds like we ought to credit Hippocrates with laying the foundation for for much of modern medicine today, even if his precise theories are wrong, but it sounds like we also need to think that it wasn't just Hippocrates, there is a whole group of people out there who deserve an awful lot of credit, even if we don't know their names. Yes, there is. And I think one of the things that's happened because ancient medicine has become much more of a topic in classics courses, ancient history courses. Now, there's much more awareness that other medical systems too are worth looking at. And we mustn't get hooked on the Hippocratic stuff. So for example, Babylonian medicine, ancient Babylonian medicine, is very interesting and has much more on sort of demons that cause disease, but also has the idea of natural causes. And maybe gives us a hint of what it might have been like before the Hippocratic's focused on the natural causes. Where people are saying, well, is it this demon that's done this thing, or is there some other reason why I'm ill? And so there's sort of interfaces between medicine and myth and medicine and magic and medicine and religion are really worth studying across history more broadly. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Helen. It's been an absolutely fascinating discussion. I feel like my medieval mind has been opened up to the ancient world a little bit more. And my understanding of medieval medicine is probably better now for understanding where lots of medieval medicine came from. So thank you very, very much for joining us. Thank you. It's been really interesting. Great questions. And I would also say go and grab a copy of Helen's book, Hippocrates Now, you can get it open access from Knowledge Unlatched. And Helen's new book, Immaculate Forms, is due to be released in September. So grab a copy of that for a history of medicine relating to women, women's bodies. From ancient Greeks to the present day. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Next time, we'll be running to the gymnasium to tackle the obscure origins of the Olympics. In honour of the ancient athletic custom, we'll record that episode in the nude. Well, only the audio version, not the video version, in which you'll find us fully clothed on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time amongst the Echoes of History.