The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield — John Shaqi
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
To take a third case: all through later antiquity and the middle ages
the science of medicine was based on the writings of two ancient
doctors, Hippocrates and Galen. Galen was a Greek who lived at Rome in
the early Empire, Hippocrates a Greek who lived at the island of Cos in
the fifth century B. C. A great part of the history of modern medicine
is a story of emancipation from the dead hand of these great ancients.
But one little treatise attributed to Hippocrates was in active use in
the training of medical students in my own day in Scotland and is still
in use in some American Universities. It was the Oath taken by medical
students in the classic age of Greece when they solemnly faced the
duties of their profession. The disciple swore to honour and obey his
teacher and care for his children if ever they were in need; always to
help his patients to the best of his power; never to use or profess to
use magic or charms or any supernatural means; never to supply poison or
perform illegal operations; never to abuse the special position of
intimacy which a doctor naturally obtains in a sick house, but always on
entering to remember that he goes as a friend and helper to every
individual in it.
We have given up that oath now: I suppose we do not believe so much in
the value of oaths. But the man who first drew up that oath did a great
deed. He realized and defined the meaning of his high calling in words
which doctors of unknown tongues and undiscovered countries accepted
from him and felt to express their aims for well over two thousand
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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