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Medicine has largely outgrown that oath. A few examples: At some point you're going to want to replace a bad heart, and to do that you have to take it out first
by toolslive 7y ago
Medicine has largely outgrown that oath. A few examples: At some point you're going to want to replace a bad heart, and to do that you have to take it out first. These days if an arm is broken, they often prefer to operate on it and insert some metal rods and pins to fix it so it heals faster and correctly. In both cases the intermediate state is worse than what you started with.
Anyway, it's fun as a thinking exercise, but I wouldn't live by it.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI don't think all doctors take the Hippocratic oath, or any oath, even. They just manage to apply common sense without it.
- diggan 7y agoI think the point of that oath is not that you can't take out a heart but rather the intent of taking out that heart should be to introduce a new, healthier one.
- hobs 7y agoThe oath doesnt say "dont do any harm at all" it says "abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman" - causing pain in attempts to fix the body has very much been in the realm of medicine since the oath was first coined.
- Symmetry 7y agoThe modern Hippocratic Oath says that. The original one Hippocrates promulgated and the ones taken by European physicians followed for centuries afterwards explicitly prohibited things like surgery. "I will not use the knife, not even, verily, on sufferers from stone" Pre-antibiotics and pre-clinical trials that wasn't as unreasonable a position as it would be now. Of course some European medical workers did perform surgeries, just lower class ones who didn't take an oath.