Hippocrates — "The causes of disease are in the air, the water, and the place."
The causes of disease are in the air, the water, and the place.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Hippocrates
"For it is not the physician who cures, but nature, who is the physician of diseases."
"The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words."
"For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restrict them to the knife or fire."
"The healthy stomach makes a good digestion."
"Men ought to know that from nothing else but thence (from the brain) come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations."
Details
A statement on environmental factors in health, reflecting early epidemiological thought.
Date: c. 460-370 BCE (from 'Airs, Waters, Places')
Nature & WorldVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: gemini
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Illness originates from environmental factors — the quality of air we breathe, the water we consume, and the geographic location where we live. Disease isn't random or divine punishment but tied to observable physical surroundings. This maps directly to modern concepts: air pollution, contaminated drinking water, and place-based health disparities. Where and how you live determines what you get sick from.
Relevance to Hippocrates
Hippocrates wrote the treatise 'On Airs, Waters, and Places,' instructing physicians to assess local environment before diagnosing patients. He traveled widely across Greece, recording how coastal, inland, and marshy regions produced distinct disease patterns. His rejection of supernatural causation and insistence on empirical observation defined the Hippocratic school at Cos, making environmental medicine the cornerstone of his practice and legacy.
The era
In 5th-century BCE Greece, disease was commonly attributed to divine wrath or demonic forces, with temple priests dominating healing at Asclepieia shrines. Athens suffered a catastrophic plague around 430 BCE, killing thousands with no theological explanation satisfying the public. Hippocrates and his school challenged this framework by insisting disease had rational, observable causes — a radical secularization of medicine that fractured the religious monopoly on healing.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].