On the Sacred Disease

On the Sacred Disease is a work of the Hippocratic Corpus, written in 400 BCE. The authorship of this piece can not be confirmed and is therefore regarded as dubious. The treatise is thought to contain one of the first recorded observations of epilepsy in humans. The author explains these phenomena by the flux of the phlegm flowing from the brain into the veins rather than assigning them a divine origin. This turn from a supernatural to a naturalistic explanation is considered a major break in the history of medicine.

On the Sacred Disease

On the Sacred Disease is a work of the Hippocratic Corpus, written in 400 BCE. The authorship of this piece can not be confirmed and is therefore regarded as dubious. The treatise is thought to contain one of the first recorded observations of epilepsy in humans. The author explains these phenomena by the flux of the phlegm flowing from the brain into the veins rather than assigning them a divine origin. This turn from a supernatural to a naturalistic explanation is considered a major break in the history of medicine.