Relating Hippocratic and Christian Medical Ethics

This article articulates the Hippocratic medical ethic found in the Oath and the Christian medical ethic as exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It proposes that the Oath has a natural-law-based deontological character (as understood by Aquinas) that governs friendships of utility (as understood by Aristotle) between student and teacher and physician and patient. The article elaborates on the Samaritan’s conduct as exemplifying Christian agapeic-love. It contrasts agapeic-love with friendship-love, while noting that the Samaritan relies on friendship-love (as found between the Samaritan and the innkeeper) to realize agapeic-love towards the robbers’ victim. It concludes with noting that the grace-based Christian medical ethic perfects the nature-based Hippocratic ethic not by destroying it, but, rather, by employing it.

Violation of Moral Values in Bernard Shaw’s "The Doctor’s Dilemma"

The Doctor’s Dilemma is known as a tragic play which has become a success and has been reproduced several times. This play has moral values concealed within it. This study aims to find out the moral actions, the reason for Bernard Shaw’s skeptical perception towards physicians, and to learn the circumstances of medical treatment in the early 20th century by analyzing the preface, dialogues, and stage directions in the play. This study basically adopts a combination of mimetic and expressive approaches which regard The Doctor’s Dilemma as the expression of Shaw’s idea and portraits of medical and social life in early 20th century. The analysis is focused on the violation of medical ethics and social norms because they are the dominant in the play. The results of the analysis are the failure of the physician characters in the play to keep their oath as medical attendants because they violate five of eight general duties based on the medical ethic. Then, it is also found out that several characters do not obey the social norm, such as being dishonest, and doing some actions to pursue their personal benefits.

Oath, Profession, and Autonomy

Chapter 4 (Oath, Profession, and Autonomy) investigates the connections between medicine as incorporating an oath, being a profession, and possessing autonomy. It argues that professional medical practice cannot amount solely to a technique. Rather, it necessarily incorporates an internal medical ethic, to which practitioners swear. It argues that the most basic indisputable norm internal to medicine approximates the aphorism “as to diseases, practice two: help or do not harm”—primum, non nocere (or, “first, do no harm”). It details the implications of medical promising—including self-regulation, education of the public concerning the profession’s commitments, and societal respect for professional conscientious objection. Chapter 4 concludes by noting that the enduring legacy of the Oath—as seen in the renaissance of medical oath-taking in the White Coat Ceremony, for example,—consists in the conception and establishment of doctoring as a profession, a practice incorporating its own publicly avowed ethic.

Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake

Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession articulates the Oath as establishing the medical profession—a practice incorporating an internal, uniquely medical ethic that particularly prohibits doctors from killing. In its most basic and least controvertible form, this ethic mandates that physicians try to help while not trying to harm the sick. Relying on Greek myth, drama, and medical experience (e.g., homeopathy), the book shows how this medical code arises from reflection on the most vexing medical-ethical problem: iatrogenic harm, injury caused by a physician. The book argues that deliberate iatrogenic harm—especially the harm of a doctor choosing to kill (physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and involvement in capital punishment)—amounts to an abandonment of medicine as an exclusively therapeutic profession. Since electively killing a patient always injures (even when done at the patient’s request), the Oath excludes killing (along with other salient harms such as sexual exploitation and the violation of patient confidentiality) from medicine as a profession. The work argues that medicine as a profession necessarily involves stating before others what one stands for: the goods one seeks and the bads one seeks to avoid on behalf of the sick. The book considers and rejects the view that medicine is purely a technique lacking its own unique internal ethic. It concludes by noting that medical promising (as found in the White Coat Ceremony by which US medical students matriculate) implicates medical autonomy, which merits respect, including the honoring of professional conscientious objection.

A Method in Search of a Purpose

This chapter examines the “internal morality” approach to medicine. According to this method, a medical ethic can be derived entirely from the contemplation of medicine’s proper nature, goals, and practice. The chapter outlines the central features of the internal morality view and distinguishes between the different versions of it that have developed, such as “essentialism” and the “practical precondition account.” The chapter then gives consideration to some objections that have been leveled against the internal morality approach. The conclusion of the chapter is that, rather than rejecting the method altogether, we should revise our expectations by assigning it a role that is more modest than that of its original, overly ambitious goal of solving substantive moral problems.