Skip to content
Wellsprings
Hippocrates

Hippocrates

c. 460 BCE–c. 370 BCE · Kos

Hippocrates of Kos (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE) was a Greek physician of the Classical period, traditionally regarded as the founder of the medical school later associated with his name. He practiced and taught on the island of Kos and is credited with establishing medicine as a discipline distinct from philosophy and religious healing, emphasizing observation, prognosis, and natural causes of disease. The large body of texts attributed to him, the Hippocratic Corpus, was assembled from works by multiple authors over several generations and includes treatises on surgery, joints, and ulcers such as De articulis and De ulceribus. The surviving biographical details are sparse and many later traditions about his life are unreliable, but his association with the Hippocratic Oath and humoral theory made him a central figure for subsequent Greek and Roman medicine.

See Hippocrates’s journey on the map →
“Life is short, and the Art long.”
Hippocrates, Aphorisms 1.1

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→

Stop 1 of 1

KosDodecanese (Aegean)

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Kos

Kos is a Greek island in the Dodecanese, in the southeastern Aegean. It is thought to be the birthplace of Hippocrates, and in the Hellenistic period it had a medical school and a sanctuary of Asclepius, whose ruins survive; the physician Praxagoras, born on the island around 340 BCE, was the first to stress the diagnostic value of the pulse. Kos had a Christian bishop by 325, when one attended the Council of Nicaea. The Knights Hospitaller fortified it in the fourteenth century, it passed to the Ottomans in 1523 and to Italy in 1912, and it became part of Greece in 1947.

See other sages who lived in Kos→

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Hippocrates’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(50)