The late Edmund Pellegrino, M.D., revered medical educator, ethicist, and physician, often made the point that a professional professes something. Merriam-Webster confirms that the etymology of the word, profession, includes the Latin for “public declaration.”
The Hippocratic Oath, probably penned by members of the Pythagorean sect, according to Ludwig Edelstein (see Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), has for centuries been accepted as the gold standard for the practice of medicine. Nigel M. deS. Cameron (The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates. Chicago: Bioethics Press, 2001) explicates the Hippocratic Oath as containing four parts:
1. Covenant with Apollo and others
2. Duties to teacher
Regard teacher as equal to parent
Treat him as a partner in livelihood
Share money with him when needed
Consider his children as siblings
Teach medicine to own children, children of teacher, and pupils who take the oath
3. Duties to patients
Use treatment to help the sick, never to injure or wrong them
Give no poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor suggest such a plan
Give no pessary to cause abortion
In purity and in holiness to guard the practitioner’s life and art
Use no knife on “sufferers from stone,” but allow others trained to do so
Enter houses to help the sick, not to participate in wrong doing or harm
Keep oneself from fornication with woman or man, slave or free
Not to divulge, but guard as holy secrets those things that are heard by the practitioner
4.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.