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Who really said it

First, do no harm

Not Hippocrates — a later proverbial motto No identified author Documented in medical print only from the 19th century · earliest English-plus-Latin form 1860
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

The motto appears in no surviving Hippocratic text. The closest genuine line, in Of the Epidemics Book I, tells the physician to “have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm” — helping first, not-harming as the fallback. The English maxim coupled with its Latin “Primum non nocere” is documented only from 1860, when Thomas Inman credited it to Thomas Sydenham.

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

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“First, do no harm” not Hippocrates. The motto appears in no Hippocratic text; the nearest genuine line, in Of the Epidemics Book I (trans. Francis Adams, 1849), reads "to do good or to do no harm," ranking benefit first. The earliest documented pairing of the English maxim with its Latin "Primum non nocere" is 1860, attributed there to Thomas Sydenham (Cedric M. Smith, Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 45, no. 4 (2005): 371–77). Via Quotle.info

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In context

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Provenance

The nearest thing Hippocrates actually wrote

Nearest genuine text
Of the Epidemics, Book I
Translation
Francis Adams, 1849
Popular motto
“First, do no harm” / “Primum non nocere” — found in no Hippocratic text
Earliest documented
English maxim with its Latin, 1860 (per Cedric M. Smith, 2005); the bare Latin in print from 1816 (per Suss, 2024)

With regard to the dangers of these cases, one must always attend to the seasonable concoction of all the evacuations, and to the favorable and critical abscesses… The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things — the disease, the patient, and the physician. Of the Epidemics, Book I

Note the order. Adams’s 1849 rendering makes doing good the first object and doing no harm the second; the popular motto inverts that ranking and drops the rest of the sentence.

Of the Epidemics, trans. Francis Adams (1849), at Wikisource

How we checked

The motto itself has no identifiable author and no traceable first publication, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The passage displayed above is a different matter: Francis Adams’s 1849 English translation of Of the Epidemics was published long before 1931 and is in the public domain in the United States, as is the ancient Greek original.

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

Four origin stories, none of them holding

“First, do no harm” may be the most-quoted line in medicine and one of the least sourced. Several rival pedigrees circulate; here is what each one actually rests on.

Hippocrates not in the text

The motto is simply not there. In Francis Adams’s translation of the Oath ↗ the word “harm” never occurs at all; the nearest promises are to “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous” and to “abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption” — both qualified by intent.

Hippocrates real line, reversed

This is the genuine source of the idea, but not of the motto. The physician is told to “have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm” (Adams, 1849 ↗). Doing good comes first; the motto puts it last.

Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689) no primary source

On Cedric M. Smith’s 2005 reckoning, Inman’s 1860 book is the earliest place the English maxim and a Latin form appear together, credited to Sydenham — who had been dead for well over a century. Smith searched writings back to the Middle Ages and found nothing earlier; Suss’s 2024 survey ↗ reports that the Sydenham attribution offers “no written primary sources,” and its Box 17 prints the bare Latin “Primum non nocere” from Boyer in 1816 onward — so 1860 is the earliest English-plus-Latin pairing, not the earliest Latin. Inman’s own Latin, Suss notes, reads “Primum est ut non nocere.”

Auguste François Chomel (1788–1858) oral teaching only

Bartlett called it “the golden axiom of Chomel” and Hooker passed the credit on, but the axiom was reportedly part of Chomel’s spoken teaching, and Hooker “used neither the specific expression, nor the traditional Latin phrase” ↗.

No author, no first publication, several competing wordings and a borrowed pedigree: on the evidence, “First, do no harm” is a proverb rather than a quotation ↗ — a good rule of thumb that acquired an ancient signature it never earned.

Context

Why the wrong version stuck

Medicine has always needed a short way to say “the treatment can be worse than the disease,” and “First, do no harm” is a very good four-word version of that. It is also a rule about priority: harm-avoidance first, benefit second. That ranking is what makes the motto quotable — and it is exactly the part Hippocrates did not write.

In Of the Epidemics the instruction runs the other way round: the physician should aim “to do good or to do no harm.” Do good; failing that, at least do no damage. Richard A. Suss’s 2024 survey of more than a hundred translations of the Oath and the Epidemics maxim concluded that the mottos “turn classical authority on its head” and that there is “no basis for the mottos in ancient medical authority” ↗.

Hippocrates said do good, or failing that do no harm. The motto swapped the order and kept his name.

How a proverb acquires a pedigree

The paper trail is short and it runs backwards from the present, not forwards from antiquity. Elisha Bartlett’s Essay on the Philosophy of Medical Science (1844) credits “the golden axiom of Chomel” — the Parisian clinician Auguste François Chomel — with the idea that doing good is only the second law of therapeutics, the first being not to do harm. Worthington Hooker repeated the credit in Physician and Patient (1847), but, as Wikipedia’s account of the phrase notes ↗, Hooker “used neither the specific expression, nor the traditional Latin phrase.”

Sixteen years after Bartlett, Thomas Inman’s Foundation for a New Theory and Practice of Medicine (1860) put the English maxim and a Latin aphorism together and hung them on Thomas Sydenham, dead since 1689. Cedric M. Smith, searching writings back to the Middle Ages, found nothing earlier — which makes 1860 Smith’s date for the English-plus-Latin pairing, not for the Latin itself. Suss’s Box 17 prints “Primum non nocere” in medical books from Boyer in 1816 onward, and records that Inman’s own Latin was the looser “Primum est ut non nocere.” Suss also checked the Sydenham and Chomel attributions for primary evidence and reported that neither gives any written source from those physicians or their followers. What is left is a proverb: no author, many wordings, and a borrowed pedigree.

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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.

Of the Epidemics, trans. Francis Adams (1849)en.wikisource.org

Full public-domain English text; Book I contains the line “to do good or to do no harm.”
Oath of Hippocrates, trans. Francis Adamsen.wikisource.org

The complete Oath in the standard 19th-century English translation — the word “harm” never appears in it.
Primum non nocereen.wikipedia.org

Traces the Bartlett–Hooker–Chomel and Inman–Sydenham attribution chains and cites Smith’s 2005 investigation.
Suss, “First Do No Harm Is Proverbial, Not Hippocratic” (PDF)osf.io

2024 preprint surveying 100+ translations of the Oath and the Epidemics maxim; concludes the mottos are proverbial.
Smith 2005, Journal of Clinical Pharmacology (record and abstract)ebi.ac.uk

Europe PMC record for the study that dates the English-plus-Latin maxim to 1860 with attribution to Thomas Sydenham.
Hippocratesen.wikiquote.org

Sourced Hippocratic quotations, including the Epidemics maxim — and no entry for “First, do no harm.”

The nearest real source

The man the motto was pinned on

Hippocrates

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

Hippocrates of Kos was a Greek physician of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, remembered as the father of medicine for treating disease as something with natural rather than divine causes. The sprawling body of texts that carries his name — the Hippocratic Corpus — was written by many hands over several centuries, which is part of why separating genuine Hippocratic sayings from later mottos is so difficult. His actual counsel about harm survives in Epidemics, and it puts helping the patient first and refraining from harm second — the opposite ranking to the motto now pinned on him.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Nearest genuine text

Hippocrates. “Of the Epidemics,” Book I. Translated by Francis Adams, 1849. The motto “First, do no harm” appears in no Hippocratic text; on the maxim’s documented history see Cedric M. Smith, “Origin and Uses of Primum Non Nocere—Above All, Do No Harm!,” Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 45, no. 4 (2005): 371–77.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘First, do no harm’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/first-do-no-harm/

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