Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

22 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquityunder the heading of ‘Hippocratic Corpus’. As has been recognised eversince antiquity, these ‘Hippocratic’ writings are not the work of one author;rather, they constitute a heterogeneous group of over sixty treatises, whichdisplay great differences in content and style. None of these writings mentionthe name of their author, and none provide secure internal evidenceas to date and geographical or intellectual provenance. Whether any ofthese works were written by the historical Hippocrates himself and, if so,which, has been the object of centuries of scholarly debate, but none of theproposed candidates have found widespread acceptance, and the questionhas proved unanswerable. 26 More recently, however, even the assumptionthat these works, regardless of the question of their authorship, all derivedirectly or indirectly from a Hippocratic medical ‘school’ or ‘community’on the island of Cos has been exposed as the product of wishful thinkingby scholars (and of anachronistic extrapolation of early twentieth-centurymodels of medical institutional organisation) rather than something basedon evidence. 27The upshot of all this is that there is no secure basis for regarding andstudying the Hippocratic writings as a ‘collection’ and individual writingsas part of such a collection, even though this has been the norm for manycenturies. There is no intrinsic tie that connects these writings more closelywith each other than with the works of other authors, medical and philosophical,of the same period that did not have the good fortune of havingbeen preserved. It is true that some Hippocratic writings clearly refer or reactto each other, or display such great similarities in doctrine and style thatit is likely that they derive from a common background (and in some caseseven from a common author). Yet similarly close connections can be perceivedbetween some of these works and the fragments of some Presocraticphilosophers (e.g. between the author of the Hippocratic On Regimen andphilosophers such as Anaxagoras or Heraclitus), or of ‘non-Hippocratic’medical writers such as Philistion of Locri or Alcmaeon of Croton. Tosuggest otherwise – a suggestion still implicitly present in most talk of‘Hippocratic medicine’, ‘Hippocratic thought’ and so on – is in danger ofmaking misleading use of traditional labels. In fact, it is almost certainlythe case that none of these treatises were conceived and written with a viewto the collection in which later tradition grouped them together (and thereare good reasons to believe that the constitution of a Hippocratic ‘Corpus’happened several centuries after they were written). The only thing the26 For a discussion see Lloyd (1991a) and Jouanna (1999).27 See Smith (1990a) for a discussion of the historical evidence.