- Claimed source
- Hippocratic Corpus
- Status
- Not present in the extant Hippocratic writings
- Translation checked
- The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, trans. Francis Adams (New York: William Wood, 1886)
- Originator
- Unidentified
The manner of all diseases is the same, but they differ in place… For there is but one form (ἰδίη) of all disease, and the cause is the same. What that is I will attempt to explain in the following discourse. The bodies of men and of other animals are nourished by three kinds of aliment, namely, food, drink, and airs; and those winds in the body are called spirits, which are named airs out of it.
On Airs (Περὶ φυσῶν), trans. Francis Adams, 1886
This is not the quote’s source — there isn’t one. It is the closest the Hippocratic collection comes to declaring a single cause for all disease, and the cause it names is air, not the gut. Adams adds that this treatise, accepted by the ancient authorities, was “rejected by the modern,” and that Littré “refuses it a place in his list of genuine works.”
The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, trans. Francis Adams (1886), on Project Gutenberg ↗
How we verified this
- Wikiquote’s Hippocrates page ↗ does not carry this line anywhere — not among the sourced quotations, not even among the disputed ones, which do cover “Let food be thy medicine” with the note that it “does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus.”
- The journal Brain put the slogan in a 2018 headline as a question — “was Hippocrates right?” — and the piece opened by hedging the attribution: Hippocrates “apparently claimed” it. Louisa Lyon, Brain 141(3): e20 ↗.
- The plainest published verdict is Yukio Nagasaki’s 2026 review in the Journal of Clinical Biochemistry and Nutrition: the precise phrase “does not appear in the extant Hippocratic writings” ↗, though it is commonly attributed to him.
- Searching Francis Adams’s 1886 translation turns up no sentence of this kind — but it does turn up the corpus’s own one-cause claim, in the treatise Adams calls On Airs ↗, where the single cause of all disease is air.
Two separate questions, and only one has an answer. The ancient Greek is long out of copyright, and Francis Adams’s translation, first published in 1886, is public domain in the United States. But this sentence is in neither — it has no identified author, work or date of first publication, so no rights status can honestly be asserted for the wording itself.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.