The Hippocratic Collection, including the most of ancient Greek medicine, remains still interesting, despite the recent advances that transformed definitely the urological healing methods. Considering the patient as a unique psycho-somatic entity and avoiding high risk surgical manipulations were the leading principles dictating the everyday practice. Contemporary physicians can still learn from the clinical observations in times of complete absence of laboratory or imaging aid, from the prognostic thoughts, the ethics, and the philosophical concepts, represented by the Hippocratic writings, tracing into them the roots of Rational Medicine in general and Urology in particular.

The observation that a relevant part of a population is simultaneously sick is quite ancient. Nevertheless, the explanation and characterization of such phenomenon, namely at the medical framework, had changed throughout the time. Hippocrates, the most influential doctor in European medicine until the end of the 18th century, described, under the name of epidemy, diverse endemic situations, and attributed them to the peculiar “constitution” of the place affected in a certain moment. But he did not approach specifically the phenomenon of the transmission of a disease by means of the contact of healthy persons with someone affected by a disease. So, the first description of an epidemy, by the historian Thucydides, has no parallel in the medical writings of his time. In any case, it motivated the retrospective effort of relevant doctors, as Galen, aiming to explain the phenomenon of disease’s transmission. The theory of contagion is relatively recent, being formulated by Girolamo Fracastoro in his De contagione (1546). This Physician and humanist received the word contagion from the intellectual Latin tradition and converted it into a central concept of medical science and practice.