Comments on Secondhand Smoke: Your 24/7 Seminar on Bioethics and the Importance of Being Human: Revisionism Alert! Trying to Explain Away Changes ...

Indeed, but to be fair, back then medicine was tau...

2008-10-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Indeed, but to be fair, back then medicine was taught through mentoring by physicians to students, kind of like Abraham Lincoln learned to be a lawyer by apprenticing in a law office. It was considered a professional duty to teach the new generation.

Doesn't the Hippocratic Oath also imply that medic...

2008-10-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

Doesn't the Hippocratic Oath also imply that medicine should be taught for free?

Dr. Miles seems awfully thin skinned to me. (For t...

2008-10-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

Dr. Miles seems awfully thin skinned to me. (For those who may not know him, he is a well known bioethicist and a supporter of medical futility, although an opponent of assisted suicide. His views appear prominently in Culture of Death.) I was referring to and critiquing the article, that was promoting a view, not engaged in a book review of Dr. Miles' book.

That being said, it is hardly a "cheap shot" to note that the meaining of the Oath that was uncontroversial for so long, suddenly began to be interpreted as meaning something different, indeed a meaning that would more easily fit into the modern moral paradigm of the controversial issues of abortion and assisted suicide.

Further, I note that the new pabulum oaths most new doctors take today, don't promise not to provide unsafe abortions, or assassinate people in their role as physicians--which is what we are now told in the article that the original Oath actually meant. Indeed, modern docs no longer state that they will refrain from sex with patients, as required by the original Oath.

It seems reasonable to me that these new oaths have dropped the Hippocratic Oath's original proscriptions precisely because they were read as barring assisted suicide, barring abortion, and barring sex with patients.

The Oath was designed to promote the protection of individual patients and ensure proper (what we now call) professionalism among the physicians who so swore.

It is being dropped and dramatically altered precisely because many of its maxims do not fit with the current moral beliefs of many graduating doctors.

Steven Miles, the bioethicist writes: "Feel free t...

2008-10-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

Steven Miles, the bioethicist writes: "Feel free to read "The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine" Oxford University Press. Check out the citations. Check out the reviews by the historians who took a look at it.
Charging "revisionism" after reading an op-ed piece is a cheap shot. You used to know better.
Feel free to post this as a comment on your blog."

That writer is not qualified to examine the oath.N...

2008-10-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

That writer is not qualified to examine the oath.

Neither are you.

I would happily listen to your analysis, providing you do two things first:
1. Learn ancient written greek.
2. Become a qualified and respected historian specialising in the period.

You make mistakes like relying on the word 'likewise' as a specific meaning, when it's quite possible the person responsible for it's translation from greek used a word that seemed to fit his own interpretation. It might even not be there at all, but just something added in during translation to better smooth the flow of paragraph to paragraph. It's a basic rule *never* to do a word-by-word disection of a document in translation.

Both theories appear to be quite plausable. Neither of us are qualified to accept or reject either one. Leave it to the historians.