Introduction 23
‘Hippocratic writings’ have in common is that they are written in the Ionic
dialect and that they were, at some stage of their tradition, attributed to,
or associated with, Hippocrates – the latter on grounds we in most cases
do not know, and which may have been different from one case to another.
This fact of their being associated with Hippocrates may well have been
the reason why they have been preserved, whereas the works of the many
other medical and philosophical writers who are known to us by name only
survive in fragments. Their attribution to Hippocrates may also have been
the reason why the names of their original authors were suppressed – their
anonymity, once stripped of their ‘Hippocratic’ label, standing in marked
contrast to the confidence with which contemporaneous prose authors like
Herodotus and Hecataeus put their names at the beginning of their works.
Whatever the answer to these questions may be, there is no intrinsic reason
to look for a unified doctrine in these works, and the fact that two treatises
have been handed down as part of the Hippocratic collection does not
provide anya prioriindication regarding their intellectual affinity.
There is therefore every reason to study the Hippocratic writers in close
connection with the many other medical thinkers that are known to have
worked in the fifth and fourth centuries, such as Diocles of Carystus,
Praxagoras of Cos, or the twenty-plus medical writers mentioned in the
Anonymus Londiniensis. Again, the realisation of their importance is a very
recent scholarly development, partly as a result of new discoveries or fresh
examinations of existing evidence;^28 and although their works survive only
in fragments, there is at least one respect in which these authors compare
favourably to the Hippocratic Corpus. They provide an opportunity to
form a picture of individual medical writers which we do not have in
the case of the Hippocratic Corpus, where, because of the anonymity of
the writings, it has become effectively impossible to appreciate the role of
individual doctors in the formation of Greek medicine. By contrast, with
people such as Diocles and Praxagoras, we have a considerable number of
titles of works that they are reported to have authored as well as fragments
reflecting a wide range of different areas of interest. And although for
some of these works and areas our evidence is restricted to a few lines, it
nevertheless gives us a good idea of the sheer scope and extent of their
scientific interests and literary activity, which we simply cannot gain in the
case of the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus.
One such ‘non-Hippocratic’ medical author was Diocles of Carystus,
whose importance in antiquity was rated so highly that he was given the
(^28) See van der Eijk ( 2000 a) and ( 2001 a); see also Manetti ( 1999 a) and Orelli ( 1998 ).