By Shelby Gull Laird and Laura McFarland-Piazza

By Helen King, The Open University

Hippocrates is considered the father of medicine, enemy of superstition, pioneer of rationality and fount of eternal wisdom.

Statues and drawings show him with a furrowed brow, thinking hard about how to heal his patients.

By Steven C. Ward, Western Connecticut State University

From the “best beaches” to the “best slice of pizza” to the best hospital to have cardiac surgery in, we are inundated with a seemingly never-ending series of reports ranking everything that can be ranked and even things that probably shouldn’t be.

By Stephanie Drumheller, University of Tennessee; Michelle Stocker, Virginia Tech, and Sterling Nesbitt, Virginia Tech

By Will J Grant, Australian National University and Rod Lamberts, Australian National University

By Paul Jepson, University of Oxford