460 BC

Hippocrates

Traditional birth of Hippocrates on Kos

The ancient biographies could not agree whether he lived 85, 90, 104 or 109 years — which is a warning about how firmly they knew when he was born.

A traditional date, not a record

A late biographical tradition places Hippocrates's birth on Kos around 460 BCE. Encyclopaedia Iranica cautions that the claim lacks a factual contemporary basis.

There is no contemporary birth record and no independently verified day or month; one ancient chronological notice would even put the birth before 470 BCE.

The earliest surviving Life is credited to Soranus of Ephesus, a physician of the Roman imperial period — centuries after the fact.

What the early evidence does support

Plato's dialogues attest an eminent physician called Hippocrates of Kos and call him an Asclepiad. That is firmer ground for the adult physician than for any birth narrative.

The identification of his family or guild as Asclepiads, and of Heraclides as his father and teacher, comes from the much later Lives rather than from any record made at the time.

Nothing is preserved about the circumstances of the birth itself, and no contemporary consequence is recorded.

The man and the Corpus are not the same thing

The roughly sixty works collected under his name are heterogeneous and mostly anonymous. Modern scholarship cannot confidently assign most — perhaps any — individual treatise to him, so the Corpus cannot be read as his autobiography or his personal beliefs.

"Father of modern medicine" is a later honorific, not evidence that one man invented rational medicine: naturalistic medicine predated him and temple healing continued alongside professional practice.

The Hippocratic Oath's date, authorship and original use remain unknown, and it should not be treated as a declaration he wrote.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. Conventionally dated here; the research places it at ~-460.

What the sources leave uncertain

There is no contemporary birth record and no independently verified day or month.
The circa-460 date derives from late biographical and chronological traditions; one ancient chronological notice would place his birth before 470 BCE.
Even basic claims about his teachers, travels, family, deathplace, and age mix plausible information with legend.
The works collected under his name cannot securely be used as autobiography; modern scholarship cannot confidently assign most—and perhaps any—individual treatise to him.