This source is from "The Medical Work of Hippocrates" and was probably read to Hippocrates" students at his school, or at least taught in some way. It talks about a "Sacred Disease" which is more commonly known now as epilepsy. He talks about how people tried to cure the disease with magic and religious purification. Hippocrates, in this source, states his belief that these rituals do not affect the person or illness in any way because he does not believe that the disease itself is brought on by any sort of divine intervention. He uses harsh words to describe the people that perform these rituals, calling them "quacks" and "charlatans" and also refers to them as "failures" and "ignorant". The "Sacred Disease", like most diseases of the time, he states, is hereditary and can only be cured by drugs. .
I believe Hippocrates" main point in this is to prove the classic means of curing this disease, magic and purification, as well as the belief that the disease itself is divine, to be false and nothing more than a cover up for the so-called "doctors"" failures and that people should look to more conventional ways of the cause and the cure of the disease, such as medicine and drugs.
I believe that these beliefs show that, even though now these thoughts would be considered normal and non-revolutionary, he was very intelligent and a more conventional thinker than most other people at the time. These people probably believed his thoughts might have been unimaginable or even sacrilege. This source also shows that the people of the time based a lot of unexplained things on gods or magic. Hippocrates was an important scientist of the time, and, although he did not introduce these means of conventional thinking, he proved them to be a more obvious than the divine reasons that so many people thought of in that day.
