# Loeb Plato publishes Phaedrus 270c naming Hippocrates of Cos Date: 1914 ## The fact In 1914 the Loeb Classical Library issued Fowler’s Plato volume containing Phaedrus. At the standard pagination 270c [Socrates](/people/jose-socrates) cites [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) of Cos as holding that the body cannot be understood without the nature of the whole. The dated public English instrument is the 1914 volume. Conventional dating of the Greek dialogue remains the early fourth century BCE. This Fact records the attestation as printed, not a lecture Hippocrates delivered in Athens. ## Context Greek medicine was already split between Asklepieia, root-cutters, and a literate craft. Plato’s citation is one of the few near-contemporary literary anchors that a historical Hippocrates of Cos existed as a famous physician. It does not prove that he wrote On the Sacred Disease, the Oath, or Epidemics. Alexandrian librarians later grouped heterogeneous treatises under one heading. 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 The Perseus text of Phaedrus 270c transmits the Greek with English. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s Hippocrates entry treats the passage as a primary literary attestation and states the corpus authorship problem in the same article. Neither source converts the citation into a dated clinic or a patient list. Official or archival record: Plato, Phaedrus 270c — Perseus (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Phdr.+270c; Perseus Digital Library / Tufts). ## Significance Initiating, low-weight path onto health-system capacity: a public name for a method of medical inquiry. Confidence is medium because the dialogue is literary. The welfare claim is modest: literate Greek medicine acquired a name later institutions could cite. Temple medicine did not disappear. Later humoral dogma is a separate Fact. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: Plato’s Phaedrus names Hippocrates of Cos. Not established: that he taught Plato, wrote any given treatise, or ran a school whose enrolment can be counted. 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 - Health-System Capacity: https://factrail.ai/drivers/health-system-capacity ## Sources - https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hippocrates - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Phdr.+270c ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/gr-plato-phaedrus-names-hippocrates