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Who really said it

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases

Written by Hippocrates c. 460 – c. 377 BC · Greek physician of Kos
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Hippocrates, Aphorisms, Section I, no. 6 — a real sentence of the Hippocratic corpus, still there in the Greek. This particular English, though, is the uncredited wording printed under his name in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from the tenth edition of 1876 onward — and it reads as an Englishing of the Latin school text Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima, following that far more closely than any rendering made from the Greek.

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

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“Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases” Hippocrates, Aphorisms I.6 — "Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases." The sentence is genuine, but this English is the wording printed in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876), 599, which tracks the Latin "Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima" rather than the Greek. Francis Adams's 1849 translation reads: "For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable." Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

Where the line comes from

Work
Aphorisms, Section I, no. 6
Greek
Ἐς δὲ τὰ Ἄσχατα νουσήματα αἱ Ἄσχαται θεραπεῖαι ἐς ἀκριβείην, κράτισται.
Latin school text
Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima.
Translation
Standard English by Francis Adams, 1849; the famous wording is the uncredited one printed in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from 1876

6. For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable. 7. When the disease is very acute, it is attended with extremely severe symptoms in its first stage; and therefore an extremely attenuating diet must be used. When this is not the case, but it is allowable to give a more generous diet, we may depart as far from the severity of regimen as the disease, by its mildness, is removed from the extreme. Aphorisms, Section I, nos. 6–7 · trans. Francis Adams, 1849

Adams’s “as to restriction” is carrying the Greek ἐς ἀκριβείην — strictness, exactness. Aphorism 6 sits in a run (4, 5, 7, 8) entirely about how spare a patient’s diet should be, so the “extreme remedy” in view is an extremely restricted regimen, not a drastic intervention.

Scanned page
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1876), p. 599
Hippocrates, Aphorisms, trans. Francis Adams (1849) at Wikisource

How we checked

  • The Greek of Section I, no. 6 survives and says what the tradition says it says — “Ἐς δὲ τὰ Ἄσχατα νουσήματα αἱ Ἄσχαται θεραπεῖαι ἐς ἀκριβείην, κράτισται.” Greek Wikisource ↗
  • The standard English rendering is not the famous one. Francis Adams, whose 1849 translation of the Aphorisms is the version usually reprinted, gives “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” Wikisource ↗
  • The popular wording is Bartlett’s, and it enters in 1876. Under the heading HIPPOCRATES, after “Life is short and the art long,” Familiar Quotations prints “Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases” and credits it only to “ibid.” — Aphorism i. No translator is named. Its earliest appearance is p. 599 of the tenth edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876; copyright entered 1875), where the footnote points to Shakespeare alone. It is in no earlier Bartlett we can find — the 1860 and 1868 editions and the 1870–74 reprints of the fifth and sixth carry no Hippocrates entry at all, only a footnote to Longfellow. It survives at p. 700 of the 1892 printing, which is where the Montaigne cross-reference is added, and p. 886 of the 1914 one. Familiar Quotations, 1876 ↗
  • The wording reads as the Latin rather than the Greek. Thomas Coar’s 1822 edition prints all three side by side: the Greek, then Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima, then his own English — “In very acute diseases, because of their severity, the most active measures are the best.” No source we have found names Bartlett’s translator, so the descent cannot be documented; but the sentence reads as that Latin line put straight into English, and it tracks it far more closely than the renderings made from the Greek, which give “methods of cure” or “most active measures” and keep ἐς ἀκριβείην. That comparison is ours, not a finding we are quoting. Coar, 1822 ↗
Public domain

The Greek original is ancient and long out of copyright. Both English wordings shown here come from pre-1931 United States or British publications — Francis Adams’s translation of 1849 and the rendering printed in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876) — so both are in the public domain in the US. A modern translation of the same aphorism would not be: rights attach to the particular English, not to Hippocrates.

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 actually gets said wrong

Hippocrates is one of the internet’s great fake-quote magnets — “Let food be thy medicine” and “Walking is man’s best medicine” both sit in Wikiquote’s Disputed section ↗. This one is different. The sentence is real; what travels is a wording he never wrote and a meaning he did not intend.

Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations Translation, not transcription

Hippocrates wrote Greek, and no one records who made this English. On our reading it follows the Latin school text far more closely than any Greek-based rendering does — Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima, printed opposite the Greek in Thomas Coar’s 1822 Aphorisms ↗. Coar’s own English of the same line reads “In very acute diseases, because of their severity, the most active measures are the best.”

Anyone reading it as ‘desperate times, desperate measures’ Sense drift

In Francis Adams’s 1849 translation ↗ the qualifier survives — “extreme methods of cure, as to restriction” — and the aphorism sits among nos. 4, 5, 7 and 8, all of which are about how thin a sick person’s diet should be. Strip the qualifier and a rule about starving a fever becomes a general licence for drastic action.

Shakespeare, Montaigne and Guy Fawkes Look-alike

Bartlett’s own footnote to the line points the reader to Shakespeare and to Montaigne’s “For a desperate disease a desperate cure” — Familiar Quotations, 1892, p. 700 ↗. Wikiquote extends the same comparison list to Hamlet Act iv, Sc. 3, Guy Fawkes on the Gunpowder Plot, and Dryden. Those are echoes and analogues, not sources for this sentence.

Genuine Hippocrates — Aphorisms, Section I, no. 6, still legible in the Greek ↗. The famous English sentence, though, belongs to a translator, and it was Bartlett’s that made it famous.

Context

Why it matters

The Aphorisms were the most memorised medical text in Europe for something close to two thousand years, and for most of that time they were memorised in Latin, not Greek. That is how a compressed Greek rule about dietary strictness came out the other end as a crisp English maxim about drastic cures — each stage of translation shaving off a little more of the clinical setting until only the rhetoric was left.

It is a useful case precisely because nothing was faked. Nobody invented a Hippocrates quote here; a real one simply drifted, and the drift is documented at every step: the Greek, the Latin gloss, the free 19th-century renderings, and finally the quotation dictionary that fixed one wording in place.

The ‘extreme remedy’ he meant was an extremely spare diet.

Three centuries of the same aphorism, in three Englishes

1817 — an edition built on the Latin version of Verhoofd prints Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima and renders it loosely on the facing page as “The greater the evil — the more vigorous the remedy.” Internet Archive ↗

1822 — Thomas Coar sets Greek, Latin and English in parallel and translates: “In very acute diseases, because of their severity, the most active measures are the best.” Internet Archive ↗

1849 — Francis Adams, still the most reprinted English Aphorisms, keeps the qualifier: “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” Wikisource ↗

1876 — Bartlett’s tenth edition prints, on p. 599, the version everyone now quotes, with no translator credited and no qualifier left. It was in none of the earlier editions, which have no Hippocrates entry; the 1892 printing carries it on to p. 700. Internet Archive ↗

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

Aphorisms, trans. Francis Adams (1849)en.wikisource.org

The full Aphorisms in the standard English translation; Section 1, no. 6 is the line in question.
Ἀφορισμοί, Section I (Greek)el.wikisource.org

The Greek text, where aphorism 6 reads Ἐς δὲ τὰ ἔσχατα νουσήματα αἱ ἔσχαται θεραπεῖαι ἐς ἀκριβείην, κράτισται.
Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1876)archive.org

The earliest Bartlett we can find carrying the line: page 599 prints it under HIPPOCRATES, credited only to Aphorism i, with a footnote to Shakespeare alone.
Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (1892)archive.org

The later printing usually cited; page 700 has the same entry, now with the footnote extended to Montaigne as well as Shakespeare.
Coar, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates (1822)archive.org

Greek, Latin and English in parallel — the Latin Ad extremos morbos, extrema remedia exquisite optima is the ancestor of the popular wording.
The Aphorisms of Hippocrates, from the Latin version of Verhoofd (1817)archive.org

An earlier Latin-and-English edition; prints the same Latin but renders no. 6 freely as The greater the evil — the more vigorous the remedy.
Hippocratesen.wikiquote.org

Lists aphorism 1:6 with this wording as a variant translation in its sourced section, and keeps the genuine fakes in a separate Disputed section.

Who he was

Hippocrates of Kos

Hippocrates

c. 460 – c. 377 BC · Greek physician of Kos, the father of medicine

Hippocrates was a physician of the island of Kos whose name became the banner for a large body of Greek medical writing — the Hippocratic corpus — only some of which he plausibly wrote himself. The Aphorisms are the most quoted part of it: several hundred terse clinical rules, opening with the one everybody knows, “Life is short, and Art long.” Because the corpus is anonymous in places and enormously famous everywhere, Hippocrates has become a magnet for invented medical wisdom — which makes it worth saying clearly when a line, like this one, is actually his.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Source

Hippocrates, Aphorisms, sec. 1, no. 6, trans. Francis Adams (1849), Wikisource; popular English wording as printed in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876), 599, and still at 700 in the 1892 printing.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/extreme-remedies-are-very-appropriate-for-extreme-diseases/

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