Ancient Science · Part 4 · Before the Greeks · B2
Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Writings: Humours, Case Notes and an Oath
Part 4 of Ancient Science: about sixty medical books have come down to us under the name of Hippocrates of Kos, though he may have written none of them. Sophia shows how their authors explained disease without gods, recorded their failures as well as their cures, and made doctors swear an oath, and where they went badly wrong. Promise to, swear to, refuse to and I will, I won’t, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight we visit the island of Kos and a doctor called Hippocrates, the most famous doctor of the ancient world.
The Library has a whole shelf of his books. Sixty of them, at least.
It has a shelf of books with his name on them, Philo. That is not the same thing. Almost nothing about him is certain, not even which books he wrote.
Because the books under his name try to explain disease without gods, and because doctors still talk about his oath. Let me show you.
Hippocrates lived on the island of Kos, probably from about 460 to about 370 BCE. Plato mentions him as a famous doctor who taught medicine for a fee, and Aristotle calls him great. Almost everything else in the stories of his life was written centuries later.
About sixty medical books have come down to us under his name: the Hippocratic writings. They were written by many different authors over more than a century, and they often disagree with each other. They may have been collected into one set in Alexandria, where the librarians gathered every medical book they could find. Even ancient scholars argued about which ones, if any, Hippocrates wrote himself.
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