2 Hippokrate ̄s is said again to have refused to treat barbarians during a plague (not the
Athenian plague); on the contrary, he sent his disciples to treat Greeks.
He died (aged 85 to 109) at Larissa in Thessaly. After his death, he received honors and a
public cult as a hero at Ko ̄s, and his image appeared on their bronze coins.
Wo rk s: Under the name of Hippokrate ̄s, Renaissance scholars collected some 60 treatises.
This mass of treatises, when examined closely, cannot possibly derive from a single person
(Hippokrate ̄s), nor even from a single school (that of Hippokrate ̄s, called the school of Ko ̄s),
nor even from a single era (5th–4th cc. BCE). Some treatises are later than Aristotle, such as
the H C H, notable for its anatomical understanding. The sole
treatise of the corpus to which one can reasonably attach an author’s name is the Nature of
Man, a work of his student Polubos, known for his theory of the four humors (blood,
phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile).
Besides treatises of the school of Hippokrate ̄s, whose medicine was environmental and
for which the patient was at the center of observation (the Hippokratic Corpus Epidemics,
the H C A, W, P, the H C P-
, etc.), some treatises are ascribed to the school of Knidos, where the concept of the
disease was primary (H C, N W: Diseases; H-
C, G: Diseases of Women). Others are philosophical, basing
their understanding of diseases upon a prior understanding of human nature (Fleshes,
H C R, H C S).
All aspects of medicine are represented in the totality of the corpus: semiology, prognostic,
etiology, therapy by surgery and by pharmacy, regimen, and deontology. Nevertheless, these
treatises, diverse in origin, subject, and audience, demonstrate sufficient coherence, espe-
cially in their rational spirit of a medicine detached from magic, that they could be read as
the work of one man.
Reception: Hippokrate ̄s enjoyed in the history of medicine a reputation comparable to
that which Plato or Aristotle had in the history of philosophy.
In antiquity, it was G who contributed more than anyone else to Hippokrate ̄s’
reputation, in re-interpreting him the better to make himself his continuator. Thus, Gale ̄n
attributed to Hippokrate ̄s himself the theory of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow
bile, and black bile), which was the theory of his student Polubos. This four-fold theory,
relating the humors to the seasons and life-stages, became received as the teaching of
Hippokrate ̄s in western thought. Even in the Byzantine era, Hippokrate ̄s was credited with
the theory of four humors, as augmented with the theory of the four temperaments. This
Byzantine Greek medicine translated into Latin (in V’ Letter to Pentadius), and
also into Arabic, was to have a decisive influence on medieval thought, especially through
the medical school of Salerno.
After the Renaissance rediscovery of the Greek text of the Hippokratic Corpus, Hip-
pokrate ̄s continued to excite admiration in the West for his observations (the “hippokratic
face”) up to the 19th c., including Laënnec (d. 1826), the inventor of indirect auscultation
(the stethoscope), who had found in Hippokrate ̄s the practice of direct auscultation. The
two best-known treatises that remained attached to the name of Hippokrate ̄s were the Oath
and the H C A.
Ed.: É. Littré, Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate 10 vv. (1839–1861); CUF ( partial: see individual entries).
Smith (1979); Pinault (1992); Jacques Jouanna, Hippocrate (1992; Engl. trans. 1999); V. Nutton, Ancient
Medicine (2004).
Jacques Jouanna
HIPPOKRATE ̄S OF KO ̄S