The Hippocratic Oath: Quaint Relic or Solemn Vow?
by Philip Hawley Jr, Public Discourse:
Despite its naysayers, the original Hippocratic oath remains an enduring icon of medical ethics because it eschews the unbound and nebulous principles of modern bioethics in favor of traditional virtues and transcendent truths.
Hippocrates lived in the fifth century BC and subscribed to the archaic notion that illness results from an imbalance of four bodily “humors” (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). His classic oath begins with a pledge to mythical figures like Apollo and Asclepius. The oath’s longest paragraph compels physicians to love their teachers as dearly as their parents, and to care for them in old age. The most famous line attributed to Hippocrates—“First, do no harm”—does not even appear in his iconic text, and whether he wrote the oath remains the subject of debate.
When viewed through the prism of our modern-day sensibilities, perhaps the oath’s most off-putting aspect is its overbearing, paternalistic tone. It implies that the physician—not the patient—is the final arbiter of treatment, thus ignoring the cornerstone of contemporary bioethics: patient autonomy.
A Transcendent Covenant
So why does this oath of disputed authorship—which seems unduly concerned with the elder-care of teachers and completely overlooks key tenets of modern bioethics—remain such an enduring symbol of medical ethics?
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