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.
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Kos through the eras
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Classical Age
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Kos became the seat of one of the most famous medical traditions of antiquity, centered on Hippocrates, 'the father of medicine.' The Coan school taught that disease arises from natural causes rather than divine punishment, observed patients closely, and gave its name to the vast Hippocratic Corpus and the physician's oath. The island lay within the world of the Athenian alliance and the contests of the Greek city-states before falling, like the rest of the Aegean, under Macedonian sway.
Hellenistic Age
Under the Ptolemies of Egypt, who dominated much of the Aegean, Kos flourished as a cultural and intellectual center. Its great healing sanctuary, the Asklepieion, was monumentally built up in this period, and the island drew poets and scholars; the pastoral poet Theocritus celebrated it, and it stood close to the literary currents flowing through nearby Alexandria.