Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liver Hume Trust.

Today's episode, Good Hummer Men.

Early Greek Medicine and Ancient Philosophy.

First of all, do no harm.

This fundamental precept of medical ethics goes back to the man known as the

father of medicine, Hippocrates of Kos. Well, more or less. The phrase is found in a work called

the epidemics, a fascinating text which gives detailed medical observations about outbreaks of disease in the ancient world.

It instructs the medical practitioner to help or at least not to harm.

And this phrase has come down to us along with the... to help or at least not to harm.

And this phrase has come down to us along with the idea that doctors should take an oath.

Even today, we talk about doctors taking their Hippocratic oath,

and in fact we do have an ancient Greek text called the oath, which like the epidemics, is ascribed to Hippocrates.

These are just two of the more than 60 writings ascribed to Hippocrates in Antiquity. We now call them the Hippocratic Corpus. But the

way Hippocrates relates to this body of texts is a bit like the way Homer relates to the

Iliad and the Odyssey. Hippocrates certainly did exist.

In fact, we're more sure of this

than we are that Homer existed.

But we can't say which, if any, parts of the corpus Hippocrates wrote.

Not only did Hippocrates exist, but he became famous very quickly.

It's because of his fame that all these writings about medicine were attached to his name.

Plato and Aristotle already referred to him as a preeminent doctor. Plato also says that he accepted students for a fee and taught them medicine.

As with most pre-Sachratics, we don't have a firm idea of when Hippocrates lived, though of course he must have been on the scene in time for Plato to have referred to him.

...