van der Eijk: Hippocratic Corpus

I have already touched on the great diversity among the writings attributed to Hippocrates and, at some time long after they were written, assembled [22] 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 mention 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. [1] 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. [2]

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 philosophical, 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 react 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 perceived between some of these works and the fragments of some Presocratic philosophers (e.g. between the author of the Hippocratic On Regimen and 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 [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 any a priori indication 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; [3] 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. (p. 21-23)