Why the Hippocratic Oath Still Matters

The Hippocratic Oath offers physicians of any generation guidelines, proscriptions, and prescriptions about how to be a good physician. We may not agree with all of its conclusions, but if we unthinkingly dismiss them, we do so at our own peril.

[…]  For most of medicine’s history, the Hippocratic Oath provided physicians with foundational principles—a universal standard for the practice of healing. Though modern scholars dispute his authorship, Hippocrates ostensibly wrote it in the fourth or fifth century B.C.E. The first recorded use of the Oath outside of ancient Greece was at the University of Wittenberg in Germany in 1508. And in the eighteenth century the Oath was translated into English. Medical schools in Europe and the United States have since used it as a way of ceremoniously admitting students into the medical profession.

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