# Littré completes the ten-volume Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate Date: 1861 ## The fact 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](/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 volumes. SEP independently treats modern critical editions as scholarship on a mixed corpus. Official or archival record: Littré, Œuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, later volume on Gallica (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k28956w; Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica). ## Significance 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. ## What is established and what is not Established: Littré’s ten volumes were complete by 1861. Not established: that 1861 hospital outcomes moved because of the last 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://numerabilis.u-paris.fr/medica/bibliotheque-numerique/resultats/index.php?cote=34859x10&do=pages - https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k28956w ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/littre-hippocrates-complete-1861