No treatise in the Hippocratic corpus produces this sentence in the standard English translations, and no primary source for the wording has been located — of the aggregators we could check, only one attaches a label at all, and that label is a 1984 popular book on childbirth. The argument, though, is genuinely Hippocratic: On Ancient Medicine holds that whoever rejects and despises medicine’s inherited discoveries “is deceived himself and deceives others.”
“Foolish the doctor who despises knowledge acquired by the ancients” is not from any Hippocratic text — no primary source has been located for the wording, and it appears in no standard English translation of the corpus. The idea is genuinely Hippocratic: On Ancient Medicine, part 2 (trans. Francis Adams, 1849) says of medicine's older discoveries that "whoever, rejecting and despising all these, attempts to pursue another course and form of inquiry, and says he has discovered anything, is deceived himself and deceives others." — Quotle.info
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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In context
Evoking the themes of knowledge, humility and wisdom. Theme: "Foolish the doctor who despises knowledge acquired by the ancients". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
What the Hippocratic text actually says
Popular wording
No primary source located — absent from the Hippocratic corpus in English translation. It usually circulates with the definite article: “despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.”
Nearest genuine text
On Ancient Medicine, parts 2 and 12
Translation
Francis Adams, The Genuine Works of Hippocrates (Sydenham Society, London, 1849)
Only source label found
Michel Odent, Entering the World (1984) — a modern book, not a Greek text
But all these requisites belong of old to Medicine, and an origin and way have been found out, by which many and elegant discoveries have been made, during a length of time… But whoever, rejecting and despising all these, attempts to pursue another course and form of inquiry, and says he has discovered anything, is deceived himself and deceives others, for the thing is impossible.
Abridged
Part 12 of the same treatise puts it plainly: “we ought not to reject the ancient Art… but rather… to receive it and admire its discoveries.” Neither passage yields the sentence that circulates under Hippocrates’ name.
The line runs on quote aggregators with no source behind it: AZQuotes ↗ names no work, translation or date — only the label “Entering the world (M. Odent).”
Wikiquote’s Hippocrates page ↗ does not list the sentence anywhere; its nearest entry is the “ancient Art” passage from On Ancient Medicine in Francis Adams’ translation.
A site search of Quote Investigator ↗ returns no article on this line, so there is no specialist tracing to defer to — and no earlier attestation on record anywhere we could find.
The genuine argument sits in On Ancient Medicine, part 2 ↗, which condemns “rejecting and despising” the discoveries medicine had already made.
Rights follow the work, and no work has been identified for this wording, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The passage excerpted above is a different sentence: it comes from Francis Adams’ translation of On Ancient Medicine, first issued by the Sydenham Society in London in 1849, and is long in the public domain in the United States.
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 is actually wrong here
Nothing about this line is malicious, and the sentiment really is Hippocratic. What is missing is the sentence.
✕
The wordingHippocrates unsourced
No treatise in the corpus produces this sentence in the standard English translations — not On Ancient Medicine ↗, not Precepts ↗ — and Wikiquote ↗ does not carry it in any section, sourced, attributed or misattributed.
✕
The one source label anyone offersMichel Odent, Entering the Worldmodern book
Of the aggregators we could check, AZQuotes ↗ is the only one that attaches anything at all, and what it attaches is the label “Entering the world (M. Odent)” — a popular work on childbirth published in New York in 1984 ↗. That is a twentieth-century obstetrician quoting Hippocrates, not a Hippocratic source, and whether the book even contains the sentence is unconfirmed.
✕
Saying “Hippocrates said” at allthe Hippocratic corpus authorship
Even for genuine passages the credit is loose: none of the texts in the corpus ↗ is proven to be by Hippocrates himself, though On Ancient Medicine is among those listed as possibly genuine.
✓The honest version: the thought is in On Ancient Medicine, part 2 ↗, which warns that whoever rejects and despises medicine’s inherited discoveries “is deceived himself and deceives others” — but the tidy one-liner is somebody else’s English.
Context
The argument the proverb compresses
On Ancient Medicine is a polemic, not a book of maxims. Its author is arguing against physicians who wanted to rebuild the whole of medicine on a single first principle — hot, cold, wet, dry — and discard the accumulated craft of diet, regimen and bedside observation. His answer is that the old art was arrived at by long trial and error, that it has produced “many and elegant discoveries,” and that anyone who throws it out and announces a fresh discovery is fooling himself and everyone else.
That is a real position with a real target, which is why the modern one-liner lands so well: it is not inventing a sentiment out of nothing. It compresses several paragraphs of fifth-century BC argument into a proverb — and then puts the proverb inside quotation marks and signs it.
The sentiment survives the fact-check. The sentence does not.
Read the full story
A small tell in the English: “Foolish the doctor who…” is verbless, a construction that reads like a literal rendering out of another language rather than like any of the standard English Hippocratic translations, which are uniformly full-sentence Victorian or Loeb prose. That is an observation about style, not evidence of an origin — but it fits a line that surfaces with a French author’s book as its only label.
It is worth separating two questions that quote sites collapse. Whether the Hippocratic corpus says something like this: yes, clearly. Whether Hippocrates the man wrote it: unknowable, since none of the corpus is securely his. Whether this string of English words comes from either: no.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 460 – c. 370 BC · Greek physician of Kos, called the Father of Medicine
Hippocrates was a Greek physician and philosopher of the classical period, born on the island of Kos and traditionally called the Father of Medicine. Very little is known concretely about what he himself thought, wrote or did: the sixty-odd treatises that travel under his name were gathered later, and none of them is proven to be his. That gap is exactly why his name attracts quotations — a maxim about medicine sounds authoritative the moment it is signed “Hippocrates,” and almost nobody checks.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Nearest genuine source
No Hippocratic source located for this wording. Nearest genuine passage: Hippocrates, “On Ancient Medicine,” parts 2 and 12, in The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, trans. Francis Adams (London: Sydenham Society, 1849); text as presented by the Internet Classics Archive.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Foolish the doctor who despises knowledge acquired by the ancients’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/foolish-the-doctor-who-despises-knowledge-acquired-by-the/