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Littré completes the ten-volume Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate

By 1861 Émile Littré had completed ten volumes of Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. In the causal graph this event strengthens Digital Learning Access, a driver that weakens Learning Poverty Rate (low- and middle-income countries) — an improving welfare path.

Sources: [1][2]

Read the full account

By 1861 Émile Littré had completed ten volumes of Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. The set is a dated editorial completion, not a newly found autograph. It remained a standard reference even after later Teubner and CUF editions. Completion is the Fact. Volume 1 in 1839 is a different row.

Context

Twenty-two years of philology sat inside a France that was already moving from humoral hospital practice toward anatomical and then microbial explanations. Littré’s notes often mark what the Greek cannot support. Completing the set locked in both the texts and those doubts.

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.

Why it matters

Knowledge-access path. High confidence on completion. No direct mortality claim.

A finished edition can still be misquoted as a single author’s voice. Later Facts record that misuse.

A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic.

Who was responsible

Contribution type and responsibility level for each recorded actor — not sole-author shorthand.

  • Hippocrates

    Person

    Direct responsibility

    responsibility level 0.2 · verified

    The corpus name is Hippocratic. The completed ten volumes are Littré’s.

What changed

Fact → Driver → Indicator. Relationship strength orders the paths; it is not the observed indicator movement.

Evidence

The sources behind this fact and its verification state.

Verified2 sources on file
  1. 1.BIU Santé Medica — Littré, Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, vol. 10 (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1861)BIU Santé, Université Paris Cité · High credibility · verified
  2. 2.Littré, Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, later volume on GallicaBibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica · High credibility · verified
What the sources establish

Gallica holds the volumes. SEP independently treats modern critical editions as scholarship on a mixed corpus.

Established: Littré’s ten volumes were complete by 1861. Not established: that 1861 hospital outcomes moved because of the last volume.

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. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here.

Causal path

How this event connects to drivers and indicators in the graph.

  1. ActorHippocrates
  2. contributed toFactLittré completes the ten-volume Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate
  3. strengthensDriverDigital Learning Access
  4. weakensIndicatorLearning Poverty Rate (low- and middle-income countries)

Cite this page

Factrail. (2026). Littré completes the ten-volume Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. Factrail. https://factrail.ai/facts/littre-hippocrates-complete-1861

https://factrail.ai/facts/littre-hippocrates-complete-1861

Accessed 16 October 2026.

By the · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed

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