Jérôme Salomon, Chief Medical and Science Officer at Zoī, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“History Of Preventive Medicine: Thank You Hippocrates!
Hippocrates is probably the first thinker of prevention in health
Today, we talk about innovation in health, data, AI prevention and personalized preventive medicine. But did you know that the foundations of modern prevention have been laid… 2,500 years ago?
Hippocrates of Cos (460–370 BC) is often reduced to his famous oath but his revolutionary contribution lies elsewhere: in his way of thinking about health before disease.
In his treatise “Of the Airs, Waters, Places“, he establishes a direct link between the environment, the way of life and the state of health of individuals.
He observes, questions, connects:
- The water that we drink.
- The air that we breathe.
- The seasons, the climate, the food.
- Life habits.
For him, the medicine must not only heal – he must understand the environment in which his patient lives to anticipate the disease.
This is a major intellectual breakthrough!
Before him, illness was a matter of the divine, of fate, of the punishment of the gods.
With him, it becomes a natural, observable, influenceable phenomenon.
And so… avoidable.
What we now call health determinants – social conditions, environment, behaviors – Hippocrates already had the intuition. Without microscope, without statistics, without algorithm.
Just a rare ability to observe the world with strictness and humility
What strikes me is the topicality of his questions:
- What environment do people live in?
- What are their daily habits?
- How to act before the disease sets in?
Prevention is not a modern invention.
It’s a requirement ethics 2 millennia old that each generation rediscovers – and that we still struggle to put into practice.
‘Let your diet be your first medicine.’ – Hippocrates
What if we finally took this sentence seriously, on the scale of public health policies?”
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