Hippocrates - The Art and the Oath

Athens, 430 B.C.E. It’s the first year of the Great Peloponnesian War. With the armies of Sparta and her allies marching through the Greek countryside, the Athenian citizens take refuge behind the city’s fortified walls. It was the soundest strategy by Athens’ most revered leader…until the arrival of the plague. As the death toll from disease looks to decimate the population, Athens puts its trust in the father of Western Medicine himself, Hippocrates. Can a medical art still in its infancy stop the deadliest epidemic in ancient Greek history? Sometimes I think it’s hard to be an emergency physician in the 21st century. Then I read Hippocrates and realized it could be much worse: I could be fighting the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, armed with nothing but my powers of observation, a few acolytes, and a bulb of garlic. Hippocrates is a lighthearted but sometimes appalling reminder of how far we’ve come from 430 BC and the father of modern medicine, written by clever real-life physician and coroner, Dr. Frank Warsh. - Dr. Melissa Yi, author of Code Blues