Hippocrates

Hippocrates was born on the Aegean island of Kos around 460 BC and is traditionally called the Father of Medicine for separating medical practice from superstition and priestcraft. The catch is that almost nothing about him is firm: Wikipedia’s survey notes that “very little is known concretely about what Hippocrates himself thought, wrote and did, because his achievements were often conflated with those of the practitioners of Hippocratic medicine and the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus.” The roughly sixty treatises that bear his name were written by many hands — one nineteenth-century scholar counted at least nineteen — and whether Hippocrates wrote any of them has never been conclusively settled.