Hippocrates

Who was the so-called ‘father of medicine’, commonly associated with the celebrated Hippocratic Oath? Elizabeth Craik explores evidence for the historical Hippocrates, who lived in the fifth century BCE, and combines it with evidence and compelling excerpts from the ‘Hippocratic Corpus’, a vast and varied collection of Greek medical texts, linked in transmission with his name. Through a focus on locality and innovatory attention to language, Craik shows how several different ‘voices’ may all be regarded as Hippocratic. Hippocrates: Man, Medic, Myth brings a vital new orientation to important questions of origins and authorship and provides a novel interpretation of a key figure in the history of medicine.