# Émile Littré publishes the first volume of Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate Date: 1839 ## The fact In 1839 Émile Littré issued the first volume of Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, a Greek-French edition with commentary that would run to ten volumes by 1861. The title page names Hippocrates. The editor, printer, and Académie context are nineteenth-century Paris. The edition did not prove single authorship. It did create the modern working text many later historians still cite. ## Context French clinical medicine was already moving toward hospital observation. Littré, a positivist lexicographer, treated the corpus as a historical document, not as a living recipe book. That stance is itself a break with Galenic school use. Volume one is the opening instrument of that project, not the completed set. [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources Gallica holds the digitised 1839 volume. Britannica’s Hippocrates article notes the corpus problem and the importance of later critical editions, including Littré, as history of scholarship rather than as proof of a single Coan author. Official or archival record: Littré, Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, vol. 1 (1839) — Gallica (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6210922v; Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica). ## Significance Knowledge-access path. Complex contribution. High confidence on the publication date and editor. A better text can still carry humoral physiology. Littré’s notes often mark that gap. The welfare gain is scholarly access, not a mortality series. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: Littré’s volume 1 appeared in 1839. Not established: that Littré settled authenticity, or that hospital outcomes in 1839 changed because of this volume. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access ## Sources - https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hippocrates - https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6210922v ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/fr-littre-hippocrates-volume-one-1839