Hippocrates, Rationalism, and the Sacred Disease
By Ezra Chan

In the Hippocratic work “On the Sacred Disease,” the author uses a wide breadth of knowledge and logical reasoning to develop his theories on the sacred disease, also known as epilepsy, expanding his ideas with Hippocratic philosophies of the natural world and the concept of a divine origin. Although the sacred disease was widely believed at the time to have a divine cause, Hippocrates proposed…