La dimensión pediátrica de Hipócrates

hippocrates of kos (460"370 bc) practiced and taught medicine his entire life. his legacy is contained in the corpus hippocraticum, a set of 87 texts written between 420"350 bc. the book of aphorisms outstands among these texts; it corresponds to a collection of nearly 600 sentences referring to different areas of medicine, summarizing hippocrates's systematic observations of health and disease phenomena. in order to identify those aphorisms referring to pediatrics, a computational screening of 578 aphorisms was performed, seeking for words associated to the speciality such as "child" and "infancy". the search results showed 9 aphorisms. the aphorisms demonstrate that hippocrates made a distinction between pediatric ages, each of them presenting characteristic diseases; recognized a seasonal influence in the incidence of pediatric diseases; describe the presence of adult chronic diseases present since childhood and referred to the concept of modifiable risk factors since early ages. hippocrates's legacy goes beyond our days, vindicating the value of meticulous observation, experience and critical reasoning, skills that can be summarized as medical art