The Hippocratic commentaries represent a genre utilised not only by university teachers and so-called "medical philologists", but also by working doctors, personal physicians, and other medical practitioners. As such, the genre of the commentary is located at a crucial point of intersection between medical history, theory, and practice, as well as between orthodox and "alternative" conceptions of medicine; the commentaries are thus ideally placed to reflect the diversity of early modern medicine as well as the larger cultural context in which it was practised and debated. In this paper, some general remarks on researching Hippocrates commentaries are presented and followed by two test cases: the commentaries on the Hippocratic Letters and on the Hippocratic Oath.
