Q&A
Did Hippocrates write the Hippocratic Oath?
• SHORT ANSWER
A perk of being the ‘father of western medicine’ was that he got the credit on a lot of texts
• LONG ANSWER
Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates took medicine to a new level, espousing reason and research over the supernatural and magic. (That didn’t stop him tasting patients’ earwax during the diagnosis, of course.) Moreover, he implemented high standards of ethical practice and demanded his followers do the same, hence the Hippocratic Oath: a code of conduct from c400 BC for a doctor’s behaviour.
In truth, there is little chance that he wrote it himself. And while it is a testament to his influence that medical professionals still take the oath almost 2,500 years later, it is a much-altered text. The oath is one of 60 medical texts, known as the Hippocratic Corpus, attributed to Hippocrates. He didn’t write any of them.