Hippocrates is known as the ‘father of medicine’ and many new doctors still sign the Hippocratic Oath. Basically a code of ethics, the oath has been modified in various ways to suit more modern mores and different cultures. Contrary to popular belief it does not contain the phrase first do no harm, but this can be seen as implicit in the text.

Hippocrates’s famous book, Epidemics, which is full of medical case studies that give insight into the lives and health of contemporary ancient Greeks, has traditionally been dated to around 410BC. However, an Oxford scholar, Robin Lane Fox, is now suggesting that it was written about sixty years earlier. His evidence being that the impact of several wars around 410BC – war wounds and starvation – was not showing up in Hippocrates’s case studies; but the names of some of his patients tallied with records of some Greek magistrates etc. known to have been in office around 470BC. (There was no data protection act back then!).

Why is this significant? It certainly doesn’t change the course of history, medicine, and philosophical thought, or derail the development of democracy as we understand it. Except in one interesting way.

Hippocrates was thought to have written his work after the great philosopher Socrates and his followers had changed the way people thought and wrote about history, politics and literature. It had been a matter of consensus among scholars that Hippocrates could not have written a book like Epidemics, which is based on rational thought and logic rather than the assumption that symptoms and cures lay in the lap of the gods, without being influenced by Socrates’s pioneering thinking.

With the revised date, however, which puts the origin of Epidemics back to about the year Socrates was born, Hippocrates’s own role in the earlier formulation of how modern thought is presented may have to be considered. More significantly, for a blog about writing, theories about prose writing being an undeveloped skill until the emergence of Socratic democratic ideas and political speechifying are put into question by the re-dating of Epidemics. Perhaps Hippocrates should not just be acknowledged as the father of modern medicine, but also as a pioneer in shaping modern thinking. Though it may be stretching the case to call him the father of modern prose writing too!