Hippocratic Corpus - Authorship, Name, Origin

Authorship, Name, Origin

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.