Hippocrates of Cos is the traditional name attached to the Hippocratic Corpus, a body of Greek medical writings from roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE rather than the work of a single author. Later antiquity made him the exemplary physician, but the surviving treatises preserve many schools, genres and disagreements. His name came to stand for bedside observation, prognosis, professional ethics and medicine separated from mythic explanation.
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
