Western Culture Global Presents The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness. #10: Hippocrates (460-370 BC) Hippocrates (460 BC – 370 BC) was a Greek physician and is properly considered the father of scientific medicine. Hippocrates established medicine as a profession separate from other fields that it had traditionally been associated with, namely theurgy / magic and philosophy. His lasting contributions to the field include pioneering, or at least immensely advancing, the systematic study of clinical medicine, summing up the medical knowledge of previous schools, and prescribing practices for physicians through the Hippocratic Oath and other works. Hippocrates was able to advance medicine as he did chiefly because he applied reason and science to the field. In other words, he sought to understand illness through rational, natural explanation and, consequently, he dismissed supernatural causes of illness, such as evil spirits or angry gods. While Hippocrates did not give us modern medicine and the unprecedented quantity and quality of life it provides to people much the world over, he did lay its foundation. Go to #11: Averroes Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category
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