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Wellsprings
medicine

The Healing Power of Nature

φύσις (ἰωμένη)

The body's own nature is the real healer; the physician's job is to assist it — and to do no harm.

This Hippocratic principle holds that the patient's own nature (physis) works to restore health, so the physician's task is to cooperate with that healing tendency — clearing obstacles, doing no harm — rather than override it. Rooted in the Hippocratic Corpus (5th–4th c. BCE) and crystallized in the 'Epidemics' maxim that 'nature is the physician of diseases,' the idea was later given its enduring Latin name 'vis medicatrix naturae' (the healing power of nature) by Renaissance and early-modern writers drawing on Galen. It remains a touchstone for patient, minimally interventionist medicine.

Where this idea shows up

6 Greek sources

Where to read it