How to tell if your patient is going to die; Prognosis, Hippocrates

 Why you might read Prognosis?

Prognosis is Hippocrates list of symptoms and their effects. As such it informs how he wrote his case studies. In doing so we gain a better understanding of his case studies.

It is in my Self Education project because it helps me understand his other works. On its own, it is a book of science about medical prognosis at the time. But as part of the corpus, it gives greater meaning and understanding to the books around it.

Content of Prognosis

Hippocrates systematically moves through different classes of symptoms. He uses this to categories if a patient will recover or die. He at times is very specific detailing in how many days death or recovery will happen.

He starts with classifications of the state of the face. Then continues on with phlegm, stool and urine descriptions. In each case, he classifies what are positive signs as well as what is negative. As well as what signs will lead to further illnesses or symptoms. He even spells out how some of these symptoms interact. These then tell us about the prognosis for the patient. 

Reflections on Prognosis

Hippocrates is systematic in his listing of classes of symptoms. Yet he gives us very little information as to how these symptoms mesh together. He does give us some but they are few and far between. This work does not contain enough synthesis for a Physician to make their own prognosis'. Unless of course, they had a wealth of experience to go with it. As such this is not a teaching text for beginners. Rather it is a complementary text for those already practising.

This is the first time I have struggled with Hippocrates' use of words. In this piece, he uses a lot of specific medical terminology. So if you're going to read it you might want to have your phone handy to look up some terms.

What others have to say about Prognosis

From STMU History Media "Hippocrates’s ability to give an accurate prognosis led to a greater amount of trust in physicians, ultimately increasing the demand for medical professionals across the Greek world."

Comparisons with other texts

Prognosis explains what we saw in Epidemics. There we saw lists of patients symptoms and whether they survived or not. This was given case by case. Here in prognosis, we see why these symptoms were important to Hippocrates. Possibly they were even more important to those reading his texts at the time. Prognosis lays out the overview and Epidemics shows those principles at work.

It takes the ideas of the Science of Medicine and puts them to work. It does this by classifying and quantifying how to make prognosis'.

Conclusion

Hippocrates in this work lays out symptoms and how to use those to make prognosis'. He does so systematically and completely. Though it is a little lacking of synthesis of those symptoms. It gives the structure for what we see in the way of listed symptoms in Epidemics. We have also seen this as the first time that Hippocrates has heavily relied on medical terminology.

Have you read Prognosis? If so what did you think of it? 

 
Want to read Prognosis but haven't? Please leave me a comment and let me know why you want to read it.

Hopefully, this post inspires you to take the time to look into it on your own journey of Self Education.

Get a copy of Prognosis.