Hippocrates was a physician during the Age of Pericles (Classical Greece)¹ and was the son and grandson of physicians, studying under their tutelage². At the time, studying medicine required you to study philosophy, as the two fields included similar concepts³, where philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge and existence, primarily accomplished through observation and theoretical reasoning.

In around 460 BC, Hippocrates sought to separate the two fields³, shifting medicine from having divine explanations to having evidence-based reasonings^3–4. To accomplish this, he attempted to trace medicine back to its origin so that he may exemplify that philosophy and medicine were never linked to begin with⁴.  He stated that human beings are products of the environment and the same physical laws that apply to the universe also apply to human physiology³. Thus, he was known as the Father of Modern Medicine¹.  

In the 5th century BC, there were two schools of medicine: the Hippocratic School and the Knidian School. The Knidian School focused on the specific diagnoses⁵, while the Hippocratic School focused on patient care² and passive treatments^5–6.  His philosophies focused on observation, case histories, and lifestyle changes, believing the origin of medicine was due to the observation that some foods affected sick people differently than healthy people⁶. While he attempted to separate medicine from philosophy, his novel practice of observation within medicine, paradoxically allied the two further, stating that both philosophers and physicians sought “the nature of man”⁴. 

Nonetheless, Hippocrates made great contributions to the field of medicine through his observational philosophies. In fact, the Hippocratic corpus is a collection of about 60 medical works from ancient Greece^{2, 5}, full of case histories, his philosophies of ethics and manners, and of various diseases and treatments he discovered through observation and surgery alone, a major one including lifestyle modifications⁵. 

Although Hippocrates was the Father of Modern Medicine and physicians take the Hippocratic Oath before practicing⁶, medicine today tends to lean towards the Knidian School of Medicine, focusing on the diagnosis. As medicine strives towards being evidence-based, we are in the midst of a crisis, forgetting the Oath we are taking and the Hippocratic philosophies on which modern medicine was founded on.

References

1. Smith, W. D. (2020). Hippocrates. Encyclopeadia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hippocrates Accessed: Dec 29, 2020 
2. Sallam H. N. (2010). Aristotle, godfather of evidence-based medicine. Facts, views & vision in ObGyn, 2(1), 11–19.
3. Longrigg. Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians. Routledge; 1993. 
4. Zahir, I. I. (2016). Hippocrates: Philosophy and Medicine. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 12(26), 199. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2016.v12n26p199
5. Turgut, M. Ancient medical schools in Knidos and Kos. Childs Nerv Syst 27, 197–200 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00381-010-1271-2
6. Liebson, P. R. (2017). Philosophy of science and medicine series – I: Hippocratic Concepts of Medicine. Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, 9(4). https://hekint.org/2017/01/22/philosophy-of-science-and-medicine-series-i-hippocratic-concepts-of-medicine/