Ancient Medicine or Tradition in Medicine

Ancient Medicine or Tradition in Medicine is a treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical texts attributed to Hippocrates and written probably in the late 5th century BCE. As with all works in the Hippocratic Corpus, his authorship cannot be confirmed and is regarded as dubious by some historians of medicine.

As the title suggests, the treatise gives a reconstruction of the development of medicine, assuming that it was an outgrowth of the discovery by ancient people that health could be promoted by the consumption of certain foods prepared properly. Primitive peoples ate raw food and their health suffered greatly. Once they began to grind grain into flour and bake bread, and to boil strong foods, they lived longer. Some people had more delicate constitutions and required milder foods, and so the art of medicine was born. 

The inclusion of this work in the Hippocratic corpus is surprising, given that it attacks the humor theory underpinning later Hippocratic and Galenic medicine. The contrast is one reason for modern skepticism about its authorship.