In view of Hippocrates' exceptional importance in the history of medicine, it seems surprising that our knowledge of his life and career should be so incomplete. Jacques Jouanna contends that a great deal can be concluded about the life and works of Hippocrates. He reveals a man who was a great ancient physician, but also a philosopher of unrecognized ability and consequence who influenced both Plato and Aristotle; a historian who was the equal of Herodotus and Thucydides as a writer and superior to them in his powers of observation and analysis; and a master of tragic narrative who bears comparison with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the great playwrights of the classical period.