Hippocrătes
（
Ἱπποκράτης).
1.
The father of Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant.
2.
A famous Greek physician, was born in the island of Cos (an ancient seat of the worship of
Asclepius), about B.C. 460. He was the son of Heraclides and of Phaenareté, and
sprang from the race of the Asclepiadae, a priestly family, who in the course of time had
gathered and preserved medical traditions,
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Hippocrates. (Louvre.)
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which were secretly handed down from father to son. Like many of the Asclepiadae,
he practised his art while travelling in different parts of Greece. He is said to have been
at Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War, and to have taken advantage of the
instructions of the sophists Gorgias and Prodicus; Democritus of Abdera is also named as one of his teachers. The value he himself set upon philosophic education is
proved by his remark that “a philosophic physician resembles a god.”
Towards the end of his life he lived chiefly in Thessaly and on the island of Thasos. He died
about B.C. 377 (or later) in the Thessalian Larissa, where his tomb was to be seen as late as
the second century A.D. All through his long life his activity was unceasing in its efforts
to increase the amount of his knowledge on all subjects, by both practical and theoretical
investigations, and his practical knowledge was as great as his theoretical. Some of his
fragments and epigrammatic dicta have passed into the literature of all time, as, for
instance, the famous saying, “Life is short, and Art is long.” He was the
founder of the school of a scientific art of healing, and, as in the case of Homer, numerous
writings of unknown authorship, proceeding from the school which followed his system, were
attributed to him. Seventy-two works, great and small, in the Ionic and old Attic dialects,
bear his name, and, apparently, formed a single collection, even before they came under the
consideration of the critics of Alexandria. But it is clear that, as the ancients themselves
were aware, only a small portion, which can no longer be precisely defined, really belongs to
him. It is highly probable that his nearest relations, who were also distinguished
physicians, contributed their share to the collection, and that it contains works by his sons
Thessalus and Dracon, his sonin-law Polybus, and his two grandsons, the sons of Thessalus and
Dracon, who bore his own name. The best known of these works are the aphorisms (
Ἀφορισμοί), which, in antiquity and in mediæval times,
were held in high esteem, and have been freely commented on by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs;
they consist of short sentences upon the nature of illnesses, their symptoms and crises, and
their final issue. One of his treatises (
Περὶ Ἀέρων, Ὑδάτων,
Τόπων), which is of general interest, and is in all respects among the best, is
that on the influence of the climate, the water, and the configuration of a country upon the
physical and intellectual life of its inhabitants. In the second portion of this work are
found the first beginnings of a comparative ethnography, which at once surprise us by the
acuteness and intelligence of its observation, and attracts us by the simplicity and
clearness of its style. Many ancient physicians wrote commentaries on the works of
Hippocrates, the most celebrated being those of Galen.
The first edition of the Greek text of Hippocrates is the Aldine (Venice,
1526). The best modern editions are those of Littré, with a French
translation, 10 vols. (Paris, 1839-61), and that of Ermerius, with a Latin
version (Utrecht, 1859-65). A good English translation is that by Adams, 2 vols.
(1849). See Berdoe, Origin and Growth of the Healing Art
(London, 1893), and the article Medicina.
