Oath Lite
Cornell Medical School has rewritten the Hippocratic Oath. The Dean says Hippocrates would have done it himself had he been alive. The effort was led by Joe Fins.Essentially it is the same, except for a few tiny modifications: that little bit about abortion and physician-assisted suicide? Out. The Greek Gods? God? Out. It's an oath. It's unoffensive. It's actually pretty good, and the new docs love it. But it is a far cry from the Hippocratic corpus:
Of the Cornell version, he said: "I think it's a wonderful oath, but it's not the Hippocratic oath."He said about 80% or 90% of medical school administer some version of the original. He said the Cornell oath is so different he would not consider it a version of the classic.
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It also does away with the promise not to have sexual relations with patients. The new oath is passive, rather than active, it seems to me. It does away with any specifics. It is wide open to just about any interpretation as doctors may wish to place on it It is indeed, "Oath Lite."
- by Wesley J. Smith on Jan 23, 2006 at 3:10 AM | link
I am so frustrated at the watering down of the Hippocratic Oath. It was actually one of the things I looked forward to about graduating from medical school, getting to recite that oath. Silly me, I didn't realize till I got here that no one actually promises those old-fashioned things any more.
- by Alice on Jan 24, 2006 at 10:21 AM | link
I was sent the Loma Linda University Physicians Oath. It's worse. See my blog (linked on the right side of this site) if you are interested.
- by Wesley J. Smith on Jan 24, 2006 at 9:15 PM | link