History, however, offers little on Hippocrates.
As widely known as Hippocrates of Cos is, there are almost no reliable details about his life. What there is can be quickly summarized. In Plato's Protagoras (311 B.C.) one reads the following: a young man by the name of Hippocrates (a common name in those days) wants to study with the Sophist Protagoras, but has just arrived in Athens. The youth asks Socrates to arrange the situation for him. "Let us assume you were thinking of going to your namesake, Hippocrates of Cos, the Asclepiad, and of paying him a fee for your instruction." This terse notice of the noted physician from Cos shows that he was known as an Asclepiad (that is, one of the followers of the god of medicine, Asclepius) and perhaps practicing medicine in or about the equally famous temple precinct of Asclepius on the island. The short passage also indicates that Hippocrates was a teacher of medicine who accepted fees for instruction, and the lines of Plato's Protagoras show that Socrates (that is, Plato) could speak of Hippocrates of Cos in the same way that he might speak of the well-known sculptors Polyclitus or Phidias and, in effect, everyone would know them as remarkable figures in their respective professions.
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