INTRODUCTION

To describe the ethical writings within the Hippocratic Corpus is far easier than to evaluate their use and influence over the centuries. There are two main reasons for this. First, our surviving ancient and medieval sources are so scattered that it is difficult to gain a coherent impression of developments over different centuries, cultures, and communities. Second, and far more significant for the historian of ethics, the very notion of Hippocratic morality has changed considerably over the centuries, both in the narrow sense of works written by or associated with Hippocrates, and in the wider sense of a system of medical ethics that appeals, in some way, to the very earliest days of Greek medicine for its values. Indeed, far from determining contemporary medical morality, the Hippocratic Oath, the major ethical text that has been presumed to have normative value, has been regularly adapted and interpreted to fit the concerns of the present (Hippocrates 1923a, 289–301; Nutton 1995, 1996a).

THE HIPPOCRATIC TEXTUAL TRADITION

It is important to realize at the outset that in Antiquity, and arguably until the nineteenth century, what Hippocrates was thought to have believed and written about matters ethical was not confined to the handful of deontological texts within our Hippocratic Corpus. Although it is likely that the Corpus was largely formed in Alexandria by 250 BCE, it was never a fixed body of writings.