“I Swear”. A Précis of Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession

Abstract

This is a condensed description of the contents and overarching argument found in Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession (Cavanaugh 2018). In that work, I maintain that the basic medical ethical problem concerns iatrogenic harm. I focus particularly on what I refer to as ‘role-conflation’. This most egregious form of iatrogenic harm occurs when a physician deliberately adopts the role of wounder (including when this is done at the request of the sick). A contemporary practice such as physician-assisted suicide (PAS) exemplifies a doctor’s deliberate wounding. I argue that the author of the Hippocratic Oath – aware of the chronic risk of role-conflation – responds to this threat by having the oath-taker specifically forswear signal acts that wound the sick, such as giving a deadly drug even if asked, giving an abortifacient, sexual predation, and gossiping. I argue that by means of the Oath, Hippocrates founds medicine as a profession, a practice intimately involving promising.