Hippocrates, Hippocrates Collected Works I
W. H. S. Jones, Ed.

6. LIFE OF HIPPOCRATES.

[p. xliii] From these we gather that Hippocrates was born in Cos in 460 B.C.;¹ that he belonged to the guild of physicians called Asclepiadae ; that his father was Heraclides, and his teachers were Herodicus and his own father ; that he travelled all over Greece, and was a great friend of Democritus of Abdera ; that his help was sought by Perdiccas king of Macedonia and by Artaxerxes king of Persia ; that he stayed the plague at Athens and in other places ; that his life was a long one but of uncertain length, the traditions making him live 85, 90, 104 or 109 years.

In these accounts there is a certain amount of fable, but in the broad outline there is nothing improbable except the staying of the Athenian plague, which is directly contrary to the testimony of Thucydides, who expressly states that medical help was generally unsuccessful.

The Epislles in the Hippocratic collection, and the so-called Decree of the Athenians, merely give, with fuller picturesqueness of detail, the same sort of information as is contained in the biographies.

Plato refers to Hippocrates in two dialogues--the Protagoras² and the Phaedrus.³ The former passage tells us that Hippocrates was a Coan, an Asclepiad, and a professional trainer of medical students ; the latter states as a fundamental principle of Hippocratic physiology the dogma that an understanding of the body is impossible without an understanding of nature as a whole, in modern

[p. xliv] language, physiology is inseparable from physics and chemistry.

From Aristotle⁴ we learn that Hippocrates was already known as "the Great Hippocrates."

Such is the ancient account of Hippocrates, a name without writings, as Wilamowitz says. There is no quotation from any treatise in the Corpus before Aristotle,⁵ and he assigns as the author not Hippocrates but Polybus.⁶ The Phaedrus passage, indeed, has been recognized by Littré as a reference to Ancient Medicine, but Galen is positive that it refers to Nature of Man.

In fact the connexion between the great physician and the collection of writings which bears his name cannot with any confidence be carried further back than Ctesias the Cnidian,⁷ Diocles of Carystus⁸ and Menon,⁹ the writer of the recently discovered Iatrica. Ctesias and Diocles belong to the earlier half of the fourth century, and Menon was a pupil of Aristotle.