22 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
under the heading of ‘Hippocratic Corpus’. As has been recognised ever
since antiquity, these ‘Hippocratic’ writings are not the work of one author;
rather, they constitute a heterogeneous group of over sixty treatises, which
display great differences in content and style. None of these writings men-
tion the name of their author, and none provide secure internal evidence
as to date and geographical or intellectual provenance. Whether any of
these works were written by the historical Hippocrates himself and, if so,
which, has been the object of centuries of scholarly debate, but none of the
proposed candidates have found widespread acceptance, and the question
has proved unanswerable.^26 More recently, however, even the assumption
that these works, regardless of the question of their authorship, all derive
directly or indirectly from a Hippocratic medical ‘school’ or ‘community’
on the island of Cos has been exposed as the product of wishful thinking
by scholars (and of anachronistic extrapolation of early twentieth-century
models of medical institutional organisation) rather than something based
on evidence.^27
The upshot of all this is that there is no secure basis for regarding and
studying the Hippocratic writings as a ‘collection’ and individual writings
as part of such a collection, even though this has been the norm for many
centuries. There is no intrinsic tie that connects these writings more closely
with each other than with the works of other authors, medical and philo-
sophical, of the same period that did not have the good fortune of having
been preserved. It is true that some Hippocratic writings clearly refer or re-
act to each other, or display such great similarities in doctrine and style that
it is likely that they derive from a common background (and in some cases
even from a common author). Yet similarly close connections can be per-
ceived between some of these works and the fragments of some Presocratic
philosophers (e.g. between the author of the HippocraticOn Regimenand
philosophers such as Anaxagoras or Heraclitus), or of ‘non-Hippocratic’
medical writers such as Philistion of Locri or Alcmaeon of Croton. To
suggest otherwise – a suggestion still implicitly present in most talk of
‘Hippocratic medicine’, ‘Hippocratic thought’ and so on – is in danger of
making misleading use of traditional labels. In fact, it is almost certainly
the case that none of these treatises were conceived and written with a view
to the collection in which later tradition grouped them together (and there
are good reasons to believe that the constitution of a Hippocratic ‘Corpus’
happened several centuries after they were written). The only thing the
(^26) For a discussion see Lloyd ( 1991 a) and Jouanna ( 1999 ).
(^27) See Smith ( 1990 a) for a discussion of the historical evidence.