GIURAMENTO MEDICO. — The medical profession possessed a sacred character in antiquity. Well-defined rules governed its quasi-priestly activity, and the oath that Ippocrate prescribed for the physician, which forms the moral foundation of an action wholly consecrated to the benefit of humanity, is famous.
The historians have treated learnedly of the authenticity of the medical oath, principally Triller in the eighteenth century and, with him, Darenberg and Littré; recent studies assure us that it must certainly be attributed to the great physician of Cos.
The oath begins with a sacramental formula of distinctly religious content: «I swear by Apollo the physician, by Aesculapius, by Hygieia, Panacea, by all the gods and all the goddesses, whom I call
to witness, that with all my strength and full consciousness I shall remain faithful to my oath.» Having thus placed the practice of medicine under the control of the witnesses to the oath, it proceeds to the vows to which the future physician binds himself by deliberate will. First of all, with respect to his teachers: he must assist them as though they were his parents; then there is the intention of admitting to his profession his own sons, the sons of his teachers, and all those who, having sworn an oath, declare themselves his pupils—and no one else. The concept of a closed caste thus emerges; it is known, moreover, that Ippocrate belonged to the Asclepiads, among whom the art of Aesculapius was handed down from father to son.
More interesting is the section concerning the patient. The person taking the oath promises, with scrupulous conscientiousness, to respect the life of others, refraining from administering poisons, procuring abortions, performing the operation for stone, or committing any act less than proper in the homes of the sick, while keeping secret whatever he may have heard or seen during treatment—in short, practising his art in innocence and purity.
As can be seen, within the brief compass of a few sentences are contained the moral aphorisms of Hippocratic doctrine, just as the doctrinal portion is contained in the books of the «corpus». Nevertheless, the maxims of the oath cannot be regarded as separate from that body of precepts which, in the De medico, the De recenti ornatu, and the De veteri disciplino, concerns professional practice: the observation of the patient, the recklessness of diagnoses, and the prescription of medicines. These precepts make the physician an honest person in life as well as in science, free from presumption and greed, calm, discreet, and secretive, as professional ethics still requires of him twenty-five centuries later.
The foundations of medical ethics appeared so perfect that not only did Roman civilization recognize them as just (Soranus of Ephesus would return to develop and expand their precepts), but Christianity incorporated them into the broader field of the Christian’s duties. A religion that inculcated maxims of love for one’s neighbour, all the more so when that neighbour was suffering, could not fail to place on a supernatural plane what the ancients had regarded as the particular virtue of a caste. Thus the norms of the Hippocratic oath do not lose their value with time. They are written in the form of a cross in a twelfth-century codex, and later Clement VII would require the graduate, naturally substituting the name of the divinity, to swear what Ippocrate demanded and prescribed. There were two oaths taken by the physician: one at graduation, the other upon entering the corporation of physicians. In the first, the formulas of Ippocrate were repeated; and a very clear echo of the duties deriving from them is found in the Constitutions issued in 1232 by Frederick II for the University of Salerno. To the other oath were added detailed deontological rules which, with penalties and fines, varied from city to city and enjoined obedience to the statutes of the Corporation. In it, questions that had concerned medical studies from the fourteenth century onward often became the subject of meticulous prescriptions: for example, the practice of anatomical dissection and, after the Council of Trent, precautions against witchcraft and the relations of the Catholic physician with others of a different faith. But, apart from precepts that have disappeared with time and with the progress of medicine, the moral line of the physician’s mission has never, in its fundamental aspect, departed from the Hippocratic oath (v. MEDICO).