Lloyd - Hippocratic writings

IN Western medicine, the name of Hippocrates has always stood for an ideal. Until comparatively recently in the history of Western medical thought, his views that is, the views of the works that passed for his were accepted as authoritative on all kinds of medical problems, and medical students read their Hippocrates not out of piety but as an essential part of their training as doctors. That is no longer the case: yet Hippocrates still represents an ethical ideal, the ideal of the compassionate, discreet and selfless doctor, and those who graduate from the medical schools of Scottish universities still, in 1973, subscribe to a version of his oath. Moreover, while the importance of Hippocrates has declined with the advance of modern medical knowledge, from another point of view the Hippocratic writings have not lost but gained in interest, as scholars have come to appreciate more fully their role in the development of Greek science, and in the subsequent history of western science as a whole. Although Hippocrates is no longer assumed to be the repository of all medical wisdom, the importance of the writings associated with his name is threefold: first for the still living ethical ideal of the doctor that they represent, second for the insight they provide into the origins and development of rational medicine in the West, and third for the extraordinary influence that they exercised over medical thought over so many hundreds of years.

The collection of medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus consists of about sixty treatises, some in several books, that vary widely in subject-matter, style and date. Although most of the treatises were written between 430 and 330 B.C., some are later works. The subjects covered include general pathology and the pathology of particular conditions, diagnosis and prognosis, methods of treatment and of the preservation of health, physiology (the constitution of man), embryology, gynaecology, surgery and medical ethics. A few of the treatises are carefully composed lectures, some of which appear to be addressed to a general audience: that is, an audience that included laymen as well as medical students or doctors. Some other treatises too are fairly clearly defined entities, for example text-books dealing with a particular subject, or works arguing a particular thesis on a theme or themes announced at the outset. But a large number are composite productions, collections of diverse material, in some cases probably the work of several hands. Scrapbooks or notebooks such as the