This colloquium funded by the Science and Society Program addresses the question of what is Hippocratic about the Hippocratics. For more than two millennia the Hippocratic Oath has served to guide physicians and reassure patients that the power of medical knowledge would be used for the good, but even doctors who swear by the Oath have at best a hazy idea of what is "Hippocratic" about it. Scholars of ancient medicine use the term to refer to a group of about 70 medical treatises from the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. which were collected in antiquity under the name Hippocrates (a collection which is now referred to as the Hippocratic Corpus), though even at the time it was recognized that they were not all written by the same man. The authors of the Corpus argue with each other over theories, therapies, pharmacy and even ethics. There has been a great deal of scholarly activity documenting and explaining these differences but to date very little attention has been paid to what it is that the treatises have in common that led to them being selected for the Corpus. It is not simply a rational or scientific approach to medicine - the belief that all diseases arise from processes in the physical world which conform to natural immutable laws and that patients can be treated and cured within these laws without recourse to the supernatural - because we have examples of authors who shared these rational beliefs yet were excluded from the Corpus. By focusing on similarities and groupings within the Corpus the Colloquium will elucidate concepts of collegiality, collaboration and progress present at the very earliest stages of the medical profession to balance the current picture of egotistical competition.
These issues are of interest to many members of the medical and wider community, especially in the areas of ethics and therapy. The Hippocratic Oath is still cited in debates on abortion and euthanasia without many people beyond the scholarly community knowing that the prohibitions in the ancient Oath are not, on the surface at least, a blanket condemnation of these practices. Moreover the Oath also contains a prohibition against surgery, which is obviously not applicable to modern medicine and was equally irrelevant to almost all the authors of the Hippocratic Corpus. If some provisions of the original Oath can be ignored what, if any, is the relevance of the document to modern doctors? In the context of the Colloquium it will be seen that the same question was applicable to physicians who practiced two and a half millennia ago and will strengthen the historical identity of the medical profession.
The Colloquium is a triennial conference that has been meeting since 1972. This is the first time any US institution has received the invitation to host. The Colloquium will be a three-day conference held at the University of Texas. The topic will be addressed in about 30 scholarly papers with ample time for questions and discussion from the audience after each paper. The presenters will come primarily from the US and Europe, but there will also be representatives from Canada, Asia, Australasia and South Africa. The Proceedings will be published in a volume a year or two after the Colloquium.
