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Reading group: the Hippocratic Oath and the ethical writings around it, then and now

Giulia Ferrante Fellow
· 5 replies
BioethicsGreek & Roman#do-no-harm#greek-medicine#hippocratic-oath#medical-codes
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Everyone cites the Hippocratic Oath; few have read it, and fewer have read the other ethical texts in the Hippocratic collection. I'd like to read them with doctors, nurses and anyone curious, and then compare them with a modern code.

Texts. The Penguin Hippocratic Writings edited by G. E. R. Lloyd is the easiest; the Loeb volumes give the Greek facing the English. I'll bring the Greek for anyone who wants to check a phrase.

Plan:
1. The Oath. Short, strange, and much discussed. Ludwig Edelstein famously argued it came from a Pythagorean circle rather than representing Greek medicine in general. That view is now widely questioned, but it's a useful reminder that the Oath was not a universal code.
2. Epidemics I and the Precepts. Where "help, or at least do no harm" actually comes from (not the Oath), and the advice about fees and treating poor patients.
3. The Art, The Physician and Decorum. How the writers defended medicine against its critics and how a physician should present himself.
4. A modern code. The World Medical Association's Declaration of Geneva (1948), written as a modern oath after the Second World War. What has changed, and what hasn't?

Two weeks per section. Please report what surprised you.

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5 replies

  1. Omar Ragab

    Fellow

    Section 1. The Oath begins by swearing by Apollo the physician, Asclepius, Hygieia and Panacea, and then spends a surprising amount of time on obligations to one's teacher: to treat him like a parent, share money with him, teach his sons. Medicine as a family guild. Then the famous commitments: not to give a deadly drug even if asked, not to give a woman a pessary to cause abortion, not to cut even for the stone but to leave that to specialists, and to keep silent about what one sees. Several of those still divide doctors today.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Section 2. I didn't know "do no harm" wasn't in the Oath. In Epidemics I it's in the context of observing the patient and the illness carefully, a practical instruction rather than a slogan. The Precepts moved me most: the advice to consider the patient's means, and sometimes to treat for nothing, recalling a previous kindness or a present reputation. Sweden's free care makes that easy to forget.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Alistair Gow

    Fellow

    Section 3. The Art is a defence of medicine against people who said cures happen by luck. Part of the argument is that physicians should refuse to treat those already overmastered by their disease, recognising the limits of the art. After a working life around doctors, my reaction was mixed: that's the origin of a healthy humility, and also of a reluctance to be seen failing, which I recognise in the profession and in myself.

  4. Tsion Bekele

    Fellow

    Section 4. The Declaration of Geneva keeps the teacher and the secrecy, drops the gods, and adds commitments the Greeks couldn't have imagined: not to let considerations of religion, nationality, race, social standing and other factors intervene between duty and patient. It also binds the physician to respect human life. It has been revised several times, and recent versions include the patient's autonomy and the physician's own health. Reading them side by side, I found the modern one more just and the ancient one more vivid.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    What struck me, as a teacher of Greek and not a doctor, is how much of the ancient material is about the physician's reputation: how to look, how to speak, how not to be mistaken for a charlatan. Medicine had to earn trust in a world with no licences. Perhaps that's still the deepest function of a code.

    Helpful · 2