Gstaad
Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’ during the Periclean period, in around 430 BC. He did not call it a virus, but a sickness of the brain. Some years later, Aristotle described micropoulaki syndrome as a disease but one that was not contagious, ‘no more than a fool can influence an intelligent fellow to act foolish’.
Micropoulaki in classical Greek translates as having a tiny willy. Women should, by definition, be immune from the disease. But they are, strange as it may seem, known to suffer from it, although not as often and as badly as men do. The symptoms are terrible: feverish envy, raging periods of jealousy, hysterical fulminations, foaming at the mouth, howling at the moon, blustering, and so on. And inventing facts.
The irony of this sickness is that although man has invented the printing press, conquered various deadly diseases, dreamed up the bikini, flown to the moon and back, and crossed the oceans underwater, he has not made a scintilla of progress against micropoulaki. It’s as bad today, perhaps worse, than it was when Hippocrates first diagnosed it in Athens. Alcibiades was the guinea pig. (All of the above can be checked with Professor Peter Jones.)
Hippocrates noticed that when the extremely handsome, noble and rich Alcibiades swaggered around the Pnyka beneath the Acropolis, some men began to froth at the mouth, while others became disoriented and swore vengeance on the nobleman. Others still went as far as to announce (fake) news of his imminent death. Most of the men who showed such symptoms had their names taken down and were examined by Hippocrates.
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