What is Hippocratic Corpus ?

The Hippocratic Corpus , or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings. Even though considered as a singular corpus that represents Hippocratic medicine, they vary (sometimes significantly) in content, age, style, and are largely of unknown authorship.

Of the texts in the corpus, none is proven to be by Hippocrates himself.The works of the corpus range from Hippocrates' time and school to many centuries later and rival points of view. Franz Zacharias Ermerins identifies the hands of at least nineteen authors in the Hippocratic Corpus.However, the varied works of the corpus have gone under Hippocrates' name since antiquity. The corpus may be the remains of a library of Cos, or a collection compiled in the third century B.C. in Alexandria. It was not, however, only the Coan school of Ancient Greek medicine that contributed to it; the Cnidian did, too. Only a fraction of the Hippocratic writings have survived. The lost medical literature is sometimes referred to in the surviving treatises, as at the beginning of Regimen. Some Hippocratic works are known only in translation. "Hippocratic" texts survive in Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin.

Dates and groupings

The majority of the works in the Hippocratic Corpus date from the Classical period, the last decades of the 5th century BC and the first half of the 4th century BC. Among the later works, The Law, On the Heart, On the Physician, and On Sevens are all Hellenistic, while Precepts and On Decorum are from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.

Some of the earliest works of the corpus (mid-fifth century) are connected to the Cnidian school: On Diseases II–III and the early layer within On the Diseases of Women I–II and On Sterile Women. Prorrhetics I is also mid-fifth century.In the second half of the fifth century, a single author likely produced the treatises On Airs, Waters, Places; Prognostics; Prorrhetics II; and On the Sacred Disease.Other fifth-century works include On Fleshes, Epidemics I and III (ca. 410 BC), On Ancient Medicine, On Regimen in Acute Diseases, and Polybus' On the Nature of Man/Regimen in Health (410–400 BC).

At the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century, one author likely wrote Epidemics II–IV–VI and On the Humors. The coherent group of surgical treatises (On Fractures, On Joints, On Injuries of the Head, Surgery, Mochlicon) is of similar date.

The gynecological treatises On the Nature of the Woman, On the Diseases of Women, Generation, On the Nature of the Child, and On Sterile Women constitute a closely related group. Hermann Grensemann  identified five layers of material in this group, from the mid-fifth century to the mid-fourth century.The oldest stratum is found in On the Nature of the Woman and On the Diseases of Women II.Generation and On the Nature of the Child constitute a single work by a late-fifth-century author,who may also be identified as the author of On Diseases IV and of sections of On the Diseases of Women I.The latest layer is On Sterile Women, which was composed after the other gynecological treatises were in existence.

A single fourth-century author probably wrote On Fistulae and On Hemorrhoids.