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Who really said it

As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm

Written by Hippocrates c. 460 – c. 370 BC · Greek physician of Kos
Verified Free to reuse

This one is real. The sentence is Epidemics, Book I, section XI, in W. H. S. Jones’s Loeb Classical Library translation (first printed 1923), where it reads “As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.” What remains genuinely open is not the text but the hand: scholars cannot establish which treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus Hippocrates personally wrote.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm” Hippocrates, Epidemics, Book I, section XI, translated by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library (first printed 1923), p. 165. Verified at Quotle.info.

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Provenance

The source, on the page

Work
Epidemics, Book I, section XI
Translation
W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, first printed 1923
Location
Volume 1, p. 165 (Greek facing, p. 164)
Greek
ἀσκεῖν περὶ τὰ νοσήματα δύο, ὠφελεῖν ἢ μὴ βλάπτειν

Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm. The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must co-operate with the physician in combating the disease. Epidemics I, XI

Read directly from the scanned Loeb text. Note one small drift in circulation: popular renderings insert an extra comma — “or at least, to do no harm” — where Jones’s printed text has none. The words themselves are unchanged.

Scanned volume
Hippocrates, Loeb Classical Library vol. 1, at the Internet Archive
Loeb vol. 1 full text — the passage is on p. 165

How it was verified

  • Started at Wikiquote ↗, which lists the line in its sourced section with the Greek ἀσκεῖν περὶ τὰ νοσήματα δύο, ὅφελεῖν ἂ μὴ βλάπτειν and a citation to Epidemics, Book I — a pointer, not yet proof.
  • Went to the translation itself. The full scanned text of Loeb Hippocrates vol. 1 ↗ carries the English sentence on p. 165 and the matching Greek on p. 164, inside section XI. The same scan’s title-page verso reads “First printed 1923.”
  • Checked the older English for comparison: Francis Adams’s translation ↗ renders the same passage as “to do good or to do no harm” at Section II, subsection 5 — confirming the sentence, and explaining why citations for it disagree on numbering.
  • Ran the misattribution the other way. Quote Investigator has no article on this line, and Wikipedia’s Hippocratic Oath article ↗ confirms the “first, do no harm” formula is absent from the Oath — which is where nearly everyone files this quote.
Public domain

The Greek original is an ancient text, long out of copyright. The English wording quoted here is W. H. S. Jones’s Loeb Classical Library translation, whose title page verso records “First printed 1923” — comfortably before the 1931 US public-domain cutoff, so the translation is public domain too. A modern translation of the same Greek would not be.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

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.

Fact-check

What people get wrong about it

The wording is authentic, so the errors here are about where it comes from and who put the pen to it — both of which the internet gets wrong with impressive consistency.

The Hippocratic Oath Not in it

This is the big one. The sentence is from Epidemics, a book of clinical case records, not from the Oath. Wikipedia’s article on the Oath states that no phrase from which ‘First’ or ‘Primum’ can be translated appears in the text of the original oath ↗. The Oath’s own harm clause promises to abstain from “all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”

Hippocrates, via “primum non nocere” 19th century

The Latin motto is not ancient. Wikipedia’s account ↗ reports that Worthington Hooker introduced it to British and American medicine in Physician and Patient (1847), crediting the Parisian pathologist Auguste François Chomel, and that Cedric M. Smith traced the expression to an attribution to Thomas Sydenham in Thomas Inman’s book of 1860.

Hippocrates personally Unprovable

The line is securely in the Hippocratic Corpus; whose hand wrote it is another matter. Wikipedia ↗ notes that the question of whether Hippocrates authored any treatise in the corpus “has not been conclusively answered,” and that the collection could not have been written by one person.

The real thing is a working clause inside Epidemics, Book I — “Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future; practise these acts. As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm” — readable on page 165 of Jones’s Loeb translation ↗.

Context

Why this sentence keeps getting rewritten

Almost everyone who reaches for “first, do no harm” is reaching for this sentence and missing it. The maxim they half-remember is not in the Hippocratic Oath — Wikipedia’s article on the Oath says so flatly, noting that no phrase from which ‘First’ or ‘Primum’ can be translated appears in the text of the original oath ↗. The Oath’s actual harm clause is narrower and more practical: in Jones’s translation the physician swears to use treatment to help the sick “but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing.”

The sentence people actually want sits in a different book entirely, buried in a passage of clinical housekeeping about reading the signs of a crisis. It arrives without ceremony, one clause among several: declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future — and, as to diseases, help or at least do no harm. It is advice on how to behave when you do not know what else to do, which is why it has outlived nearly everything around it.

The line everyone quotes as the Oath’s opening promise is a working note from a book of case records.

Two numbering systems, one sentence

Different English editions cut Epidemics Book I differently, which is why citations for this line disagree. The Loeb edition places it in section XI. Francis Adams’s older translation, hosted at MIT’s Internet Classics Archive ↗, puts the same passage at Section II, subsection 5 — and renders it far less memorably, as the physician having “two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.” Wikiquote cites it as Book I, Ch. 2.

The modern popularity of the crisper wording is a translation effect, not a textual one. Adams’s “to do good or to do no harm” is the version Wikipedia quotes when discussing the maxim’s ancestry; Jones’s “to help, or at least to do no harm” is the version that circulates as a quotation. Same Greek, same sentence, different century of English.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Hippocrates — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line in its sourced section, cited to Epidemics Book I, with the Greek original and a variant translation.
Loeb Hippocrates, vol. 1 — full textarchive.org

The scanned text of Jones’s translation. The quoted sentence appears on p. 165, facing the Greek on p. 164.
Loeb Hippocrates, vol. 1 — catalog recordarchive.org

Item record confirming translator W. H. S. Jones (1876–1963), Heinemann, and the Loeb bilingual Greek/English format.
Of the Epidemics, tr. Francis Adamsclassics.mit.edu

The older public-domain English rendering of the same passage — “to do good or to do no harm” — at Section II, subsection 5.
Primum non nocereen.wikipedia.org

Traces the Latin tag to 19th-century medicine: Worthington Hooker’s Physician and Patient (1847) crediting Chomel, and an attribution to Sydenham in Inman (1860).
Hippocratic Oathen.wikipedia.org

States directly that no phrase translatable as “First” or “Primum” appears in the original Oath, and quotes the Oath’s real harm clause.

The true author

Hippocrates of Kos

Hippocrates

c. 460 – c. 370 BC · Greek physician of Kos, the ‘Father of Medicine’

Hippocrates was a physician and philosopher of the Greek classical period, born on the island of Kos around 460 BC and traditionally called the Father of Medicine for insisting that disease had natural rather than divine causes. His name is attached to the Hippocratic Corpus, some sixty treatises on diagnosis, prognosis, ethics and clinical observation. Wikipedia is blunt that the collection “could not have been written by one person” — scholars count roughly nineteen hands in it — so Epidemics is Hippocratic in the sense that matters bibliographically, while personal authorship stays unresolved.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Chicago

Hippocrates. Epidemics, Book I, section XI. In Hippocrates, vol. 1, translated by W. H. S. Jones, 165. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, first printed 1923.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/as-to-diseases-make-a-habit-of-two-things-to-help-or-at/

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