MEDICAL OATH. - The profession of the physician had a sacred character in antiquity. Well-defined rules governed his almost priestly activity, and the oath that Hippocrates prescribed for the physician is famous and forms the moral basis of an action wholly consecrated to the benefit of humanity.
On the authenticity of the m. o. historians treated learnedly, principally Triller in the eighteenth century and with him Daremberg and Littré; recent studies assure that it is certainly to be attributed to the great physician of Cos.
The oath begins with the sacramental formula of a markedly religious content: "I swear by Apollo the physician, by Aesculapius, by Hygieia, Panacea, by all the gods, by all the goddesses, whom I call to witness, that I will with all my strength and full conscience keep faith with my oath." Having thus placed the practice of medicine under the control of the witnesses of the oath, it then passes to the vows, to which the future physician binds himself with deliberate will. First of all, with respect to his teachers: he must help them as if they were his parents; then the resolve to make his own sons and the sons of his teachers and as many as declare themselves his pupils by oath, and no one else, share in his profession. Thus the concept of a closed caste emerges; it is known, moreover, that Hippocrates belonged to the Asclepiads, among whom the art of Aesculapius was handed down from father to son.
More interesting is the part concerning the patient. The one swearing promises to respect the life of others with scrupulous conscience; abstaining from administering poisons, from procuring abortions, from performing the operation for the stone, from any act less than upright in the houses of the sick, while he will keep secret whatever he has heard or seen during the treatment, exercising, in short, his art in innocence and purity.
As can be seen, within the brief compass of a few sentences are contained the moral aphorisms of the Hippocratic doctrine, just as in the books of the "corpus" is contained the doctrinal part. Nevertheless the maxims of the oath cannot be considered disjoined from that body of precepts which in the De medico, in the De recenti ornatu, in the De veteri disciplina, concern professional practice; such as the observation of the patient, the rashness of diagnoses, the prescribing of medicines — precepts that make the physician an honest person in life as in science, averse to presumptions and greed, serene, reserved, discreet, as still, twenty-five centuries later, professional deontology requires him to be.
These foundations of medical ethics appeared so perfect that not only did Roman civilization (Soranus of Ephesus would return to develop and expand their precepts) recognize them as just, but Christianity framed them within the broader field of the duties of the Christian. A religion that inculcated maxims of love for one's neighbor, and all the more so inasmuch as it was a suffering neighbor, could not fail to place on a supernatural plane what the ancients considered a particular virtue of a caste. Therefore the norms of the Hippocratic oath do not lose their value with time. They are found written in the form of a cross in a codex of the twelfth century, and later Clement VII would require that the graduate, having naturally changed the name of the divinity, swear what Hippocrates demands and prescribes. There were two oaths that the physician took: one at graduation, the other upon entry into the guild of physicians. In the first the formulas of Hippocrates were repeated; and of the duties deriving from them there is a very clear echo in the Constitutions issued in 1232 by Frederick II for the University of Salerno. To the other oath were added detailed deontological norms, which, with penalties and fines, varied from city to city and recommended obedience to the statutes of the Guild. In it, questions that from the fourteenth century onward concerned medical studies often formed the object of minute prescriptions; thus, 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 dictates that have disappeared with time and with the progress of medicine, the moral line of the physician's mission has never departed in its fundamental part from the Hippocratic oath (v. MEDICO).