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Hippocrates

Hippocrates

c. 460 BCE–c. 370 BCE · Kos

Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE) was a Greek physician of the Classical period, traditionally regarded as the founder of the medical school later associated with his name. He practiced and taught on the island of Kos and is credited with establishing medicine as a discipline distinct from philosophy and religious healing, emphasizing observation, prognosis, and natural causes of disease. The large body of texts attributed to him, the Hippocratic Corpus, was assembled from works by multiple authors over several generations and includes treatises on surgery, joints, and ulcers such as De articulis and De ulceribus. The surviving biographical details are sparse and many later traditions about his life are unreliable, but his association with the Hippocratic Oath and humoral theory made him a central figure for subsequent Greek and Roman medicine.

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“Life is short, and the Art long.”
Hippocrates, Aphorisms 1.1

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KosDodecanese (Aegean)

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Kos

An Aegean island off the coast of Asia Minor, renowned as the home of Hippocrates and the great medical school that made his name a byword for the physician's art.

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Hippocrates’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(50)