THE HIPPOCRATIC COLLECTION Early in the history of the Alexandrian medical school—prob ably not long after 30o B.C.-there began to circulate a group of medical works that has since become known as the Hippocratic Collection. The name of Hippocrates was already at that date held in high veneration, and into this collection was thrown every thing that could, by any device, be passed off as of Hippocratic origin. The genuineness of some of these works was suspected from a very early date. Ancient scholars applied themselves to their critical study. Notable among these students was Galen (q.v.) who lived six hundred years after Hippocrates and wrote commentaries on a number of works of the Collection. But dubious in its origin as was the Collection, it had not remained intact even between the time when first put together and the time of Galen. On the contrary, during that interval it had suffered considerable alteration—both by accretion and loss—to say noth ing of confusion and error due to the mistakes, dishonesty, haste and ignorance of booksellers, scribes and editors. Further, the deterioration continued after Galen. Our earliest manuscript of the Collection is of the ninth century A.D. ; our earliest manu script of a translation is of the seventh century, and is a Latin version of the obviously spurious Dynamidia; while the earliest documents of any part of the Collection are papyrus fragments, of the third or fourth century, of the no less spurious Epistolae. Thus the Hippocratic Collection provides an ideal battle ground for textual criticism and for the discussion of genuineness. The literature on it is vast. Here, we shall give only conclusions.
The works which make up the Hippocratic Collection are vari ously numbered and divided, and can be regarded, according to taste, as between about 7o and about loo. Where and when were they written? Of later works, some of the more recent, dating from the time of the Empire, were probably mostly written in Rome and may be as late as the third century A.D. The main interest of the Collection is, however, concentrated on the earlier works. Of these the very earliest were composed in the 5th century B.C. and came from the shores of Asia Minor, one or two possibly from Sicily. In Asia Minor two schools of Medicine were early organized. The older was associated with the peninsula of Cnidus. The younger has always been associated with the opposite island of Cos, though it would be safer to link it with Coan physicians rather than with Coan soil, for reasons which we have given above. It is with the Coan school that the name of Hippocrates will be for ever linked. The Coan and the Cnidan schools represent di vergent views and their differences cleft the medical world of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. There is indeed evidence of further sub-division of medical opinion even at this early period. Later medical writers, in the sect-ridden days of the Empire, looked back to the Hippocratic time as to a golden age which basked in the uninterrupted sunshine of a pure and undisputed doctrine. Modern historians have not been slow to follow and to see in the Hippocratic writers clear-eyed observers, unmoved in their pur suit of truth by any preconceived view of its nature, uncorrupted by the jargon of the schools, naked heroes of science facing the world as it is and not as it may be thought to be. A very small body of works there is to which such a conception is particularly applicable—and perhaps these only because we do not possess them in the complete form. For most of them the cold and piteous light of investigation dispels the radiant vision. The men of that time were well-nigh as riven into sects and driven by doctrines as those of a later age.
But Hippocrates was, by all tradition, above and beyond the noisy warfare of the Schools. He it was, as Celsus (1st century A.D.) tells us, "who first separated medicine from philosophy." That is, in the language of the present day, he observed and in ferred without allowing his judgment to be biased by preconceived ideas. Now there is a small group of treatises in the Collection of which this can fairly be said. Is this the residuum of works of which perhaps the famous tracts known as the first and third books of the Epidemics are the foremost examples by the "father of medicine" himself ? We may say so, if we will, but in doing so we have no test of authenticity save excellence. If we examine even these "authentic" works closely we shall find them by no means as free from preconceived ideas as many have considered. Scientific thinkers of the fifth century B.C. were indeed much like those of the twentieth century A.D., for all their work was conditioned and controlled by their past.
Among the more striking literary characteristics of the Hippo cratic Collection is the so-called "aphoristic style," in which con clusions of wide general import are compressed into very short and easily remembered sentences. Several of the works of the Collection adopt this method, the best known being the admirable treatise which bears the title Aphorisms and opens with the most famous sentence of the whole Collection, "Art is long and Life is short." As a rule common style is an argument for common authorship, but in the case of aphorisms imitation is so easy that confidence as to authorship is almost impossible. (See MEDICINE, HISTORY OF.) Nearly every treatise in the Collection requires separate and individual discussion from the point of view of style, authorship, philosophical associations, language, sources, doctrines and interpretation. The works of the Collection can no more be treated in common than can the books of the Old Testament, which cover a comparable area of time. We may, however, make one general negative statement. The works of the Collection contain nothing of superstition. They are sometimes wearisomely sophistic ; they are frequently ludicrously wrong; they often advance absurd hypotheses; they are not seldom ob scure. But the attitude of their authors to the supernatural is the same throughout and none swerves in his loyalty to the idea of natural law. There is a work on The Sacred Disease (i.e. Epi lepsy) which puts the point for us: "As for this disease called divine, surely it too has its nature and causes whence it originates, just like other diseases, and is curable by means comparable to their cure. It arises—like other diseases—from things which enter and quit the body, such as cold, the sun, and the winds, things which are ever changing and never at rest. Such things are divine or not—as you will, for the distinction matters not—and there is no need to make such division anywhere in nature, for all are alike divine or all are alike human. All have their antecedent causes which can be found by those who seek them." (Slightly paraphrased.) The Sacred Disease was written about 400 B.C. and another work in the Collection, the Airs, Waters and Places is perhaps by the same author, but there are not many instances in the collection in which several works can be safely ascribed to one hand.
A famous section of the Collection is the so-called Hippocratic Oath, which sets the tone of that ethical character which char acterises nearly all—though not quite all—of the writings which bear the name of Hippocrates. We regard the Oath in its present form as of the third century A.D. It is perhaps the latest work in the Collection. By its very lateness, however, it illustrates the width and depth of the ethical influences exerted by this great Collection. (For the Hippocratic Oath see MEDICINE, HISTORY OF) .
There are several surgical treatises in the Collection, of which the earliest, On Wounds of the Head, dates from the early part of the fourth century B.C. It has affinities with certain Egyptian papyri and part of it may be of Egyptian origin. It awakens in us a peculiarly vivid interest when we find it describing the oper ation of trephining almost as practised to-day. Nor can our attention fail to be arrested by the startling modernness of the little lecture notebook Concerning Things in the Surgery, when we read such a category as this:— "Operative requisites in the surgery ; the patient, the operator, assistants, instruments, the light, where and how placed ; the patient's person and apparatus. The operator, whether seated or standing, should be placed conveniently to the part being operated upon, and to the light. Each of the two kinds of light, ordinary and artificial, may be used in two ways, direct or oblique." Or again, such details as : "The nails (of the operator) neither to exceed nor come short of the finger tips. Practice using the finger ends. Practice all the operations with each hand and with both together, your object being to attain ability, grace, speed, painlessness, elegance, and readiness." "Let those who look after the patient present the part for operation as you want it, and hold fast the rest of the body so as to be all steady, keeping silence and obeying their superior.
Surely we are here in an up-to-date operating theatre, and the Greeks are the most modern of peoples.
BIBLIOGRAPHY —The only complete translation of the Hippocratic Bibliography—The only complete translation of the Hippocratic Collection is Emile Littre,, Oeuvres completes d'H., Io vols., Paris (1839 1869) . A critical text is appearing in the Corpus Medicorum Grae corum (Teubner, Leipzig) . The most important works are treated by W. H. S. Jones and E. T. Withington in the Loeb Classical Library. Francis Adams, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, London (1849) is still valuable. For references to H. in classical writings see H. Poschen rieder, Die platonischen Dialoge in ihrem Verhdltnisse zu den hippo kratischen Schriften, Landshut (1882) and Die naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften des Aristoteles in ihrem Verhdltnis zu den hippokratischen Sammlung, Bamberg (1887). For mss. see H. Diels, Die Handschriften der antike Aerzte, Teil I, Berlin (19o5) . From the vast recent litera ture on the Hippocratic problem we select: F. Spaet, Geschichtliche Entwickelung der Hippokratischen Medizin, Berlin (1897) ; C. Fried rich, Hippokratische Untersuchungen, Berlin (1899) ; M. Wellmann, Die Fragmente der Sikelischen Aerzte Akron Philistion and Diokles, Berlin, 1901 (radical) ; W. H. Roscher, Die Hebdomadenlehren der Griechischen Philosophen and Aerzte, Leipzig, 1906 (fanciful at times) ; A. Nelson, Die Hippokratische Schrif t IIEPI cFTZSZN Upsala, (1909) ; W. A. Heidel, "Hippocratea" in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Camb. Mass. (1914) ; "Conception of Nature among Pre Socratics" American Academy of Arts and Sciences (191o) ; T. Gom perz, "Die hippokratische Frage" (radical) in Philologus, Leipzig (191I) ; E. Nachmanson, Erotianstudien, Upsala (1917) ; C. Singer, Greek Biology and Greek Medicine, Oxford (1922) ; R. 0. Moon, Hip pocrates and his Successors, London, 1923 (conservative) ; E. Wenke bach, Untersuchungen ihber Galens Kommentare zu den Epidemien des H., Berlin (1925) ; W. H. S. Jones, The Doctor's Oath, Cambridge (1926) (differs from views expressed above) ; A Bibliography of the excavations at Cos is in K. Sudhoff, Kos and Knidos (Munich, 1927). For Hippocratic Bibliography, E. Kind in Bursians Jahresbericht fiber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertums wissenschaft, Leipzig (1919) .
(C. Si.)