Hippocratic Corpus
|
|
The Hippocratic Corpus is a library, or rather, the remains of a library. Although the thirty four books which are included in the collection were attributed to Hippocrates himself in antiquity, scholars now know that they were in all likelihood composed between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. Between the career of Hippocrates and the pre-Socratic philosophers a special kind of prose for medical writings was developed in Greece. Although the island home Cos of Hippocrates is located within what was a Doric speaking region, the medical writers of Cos who developed the Hippocratic treatises appropriated the dialect of philosophy, that is Ionic Greek. The use of Ionic instead of the native Doric dialect is analogous to the practice of Renaissance scientists, such as Andreas Vesalius, using Latin instead of the vernacular for their treatises.