Hippocrates — "To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy."
To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
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More from Hippocrates
"For it is not the physician who cures, but nature, who is the physician of diseases."
"Rest and sleep are the best cures for many diseases."
"The art of medicine is to restore health, not to take life."
"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."
"The best thing is to prevent disease."
Details
From 'Epidemics', advocating for the body's natural healing processes and avoiding unnecessary intervention.
Date: c. 5th Century BCE
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Sometimes the wisest course is restraint — letting the body heal without intervention. Treatments carry risks, and not every ailment needs active medical response. When a condition will resolve on its own, forcing a remedy can cause more harm than good. The skill lies in knowing when to act and when to step back, trusting natural recovery processes over the impulse to always do something.
Relevance to Hippocrates
Hippocrates built medicine on careful observation rather than reckless intervention. His writings in the Hippocratic Corpus consistently emphasize the healing power of nature — vis medicatrix naturae — arguing that physicians should support the body's own recovery, not override it. This principle directly countered practitioners who prescribed elaborate treatments to appear useful. His foundational ethic of first, do no harm flows directly from this same restraint.
The era
In ancient Greece, medicine competed directly with religious healing at Asclepian temples, where priests performed rituals to invoke divine cures. Physicians felt constant pressure to demonstrate their value through visible, often aggressive treatments — purges, bloodletting, complex herbal compounds. Against this backdrop, advising inaction was professionally risky and culturally counterintuitive. Hippocrates's empirical approach challenged the assumption that healers must always actively intervene, distinguishing rational medicine from ritual performance.
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