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medicine

The Medical Aphorism

ἀφορισμός

The terse clinical maxim that packs hard-won experience into a memorable rule — beginning 'Life is short, the art long.'

The medical aphorism is a short, pointed maxim that compresses clinical experience into a teachable, quotable rule about disease, treatment, and the limits of the healer's art. The Hippocratic 'Aphorisms' (4th c. BCE) is the genre's founding collection, opening with the celebrated line 'Life is short, the art long, the moment fleeting, experiment perilous, judgement difficult.' Memorized by physicians for over two thousand years and densely annotated by Galen and later Arabic and Latin scholars, it made practical bedside knowledge both portable and durable.

Where this idea shows up

7 Greek sources

Where to read it