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Updated: May 31, 2025
The notion of Democritus of Abdera, respecting the origin of dreams and divination, may not be uninteresting to the reader, partly from something vast and terrible in the fantasy, partly as a proof of the strange, incongruous, bewildered chaos of thought, from which at last broke the light of the Grecian philosophy.
DEMOCRITUM: of Abdera, one of the originators of the theory of atoms; said to have lived from 460 to 361 or 357 B.C. XENOCRATEN after Plato, Speusippus was the first head of the Academic School; Xenocrates succeeded him. He lived from 397 to 315 or 313. ZENONEM: of Citium in Cyprus, founder of Stoicism, born about 357, is said to have lived to the age of 98.
He could find no place for it in his twilight world of abstractions. Was it not he who wished to burn the works of Democritus of Abdera, most exact and reasonable of old sages? They are all alike, these humanitarian lovers of first causes. Always ready to burn something, or somebody; always ready with their cheerful Hell-fire and gnashing of teeth.
And he sent Harpagus against the cities of the Ionians, of whom certain Phocæans and Teians sailed away to Rhegium and Abdera rather than become the slaves of the barbarians; but the rest, though they fought valiantly enough, were brought to submission by Harpagus.
The man is Hippocrates himself. Of the actual details of his life we know next to nothing. His period of greatest activity falls about 400 B. C. He seems to have led a wandering life. Born of a long line of physicians in the island of Cos, he exerted his activities in Thrace, Abdera, Delos, the Propontis (Cyzicus), Thasos, Thessaly (notably at Larissa and Meliboea), Athens, and elsewhere, dying at Larissa in extreme old age about the year 377 B. C. He had many pupils, among whom were his two sons Thessalus and Dracon, who also undertook journeys, his son-in-law Polybus, of whose works a fragment has been preserved for us by Aristotle, together with three other Coans bearing the names Apollonius, Dexippus, and Praxagoras. This is practically all we know of him with certainty. But though this glimpse is very dim and distant, yet we cannot exaggerate the influence on the course of medicine and the value for physicians of all time of the traditional picture that was early formed of him and that may indeed well be drawn again from the works bearing his name. In beauty and dignity that figure is beyond praise. Perhaps gaining in stateliness what he loses in clearness, Hippocrates will ever remain the type of the perfect physician. Learned, observant, humane, with a profound reverence for the claims of his patients, but an overmastering desire that his experience shall benefit others, orderly and calm, disturbed only by anxiety to record his knowledge for the use of his brother physicians and for the relief of suffering, grave, thoughtful and reticent, pure of mind and master of his passions, this is no overdrawn picture of the Father of Medicine as he appeared to his contemporaries and successors. It is a figure of character and virtue which has had an ethical value to medical men of all ages comparable only to the influence exerted on their followers by the founders of the great religions. If one needed a maxim to place upon the statue of Hippocrates, none could be found better than that from the book
The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the supposed insanity of Democritus, "who at that time," saith Hippocrates, dryly, "was seriously engaged in philosophy." That same people of Abdera would certainly have found very alarming symptoms of madness in my poor father; for, like Democritus, "he esteemed as nothing the things, great or small, in which the rest of the world were employed."
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