Some things never change.

Med School Day 2 (kinda)

Second Day of Orientation

Today, mixed in with the usual orientation bureaucracy and being informed that we have 8 (count 'em, 8) different passwords, we had our first real class.  Med students today don't take the real hippocratic oath, because it's 2500 years old and that may mean it's a bit outdated.  Instead, most schools use some revised version encompassing the main ideas of the oath, and here we get to write our own each year!  Really, this just means that each class looks at last year's oath and changes a couple words to make themselves feel warm and fuzzy inside, but anyways.

So, the school sent home a bunch of example oaths and ethics papers, so everyone could read them over the summer to develop their own ideas of what a Physician's oath might entail.  Then today we met in small groups to discuss.

And there we are, 10 of the "best medical students in the country", as we have been told all week, sitting with one of the school's foremost experts in Medical Ethics.  And...the silence descends.  It really is comforting to know that for all the overachievers and geniuses that are supposed to be in this class, it still takes pulling teeth to get anyone to speak up in class.

Eventually, we came to the conclusion that no one really cared if our oath was different than last year's oath, so we looked at the real hippocratic oath.  Some of the pledges ancient Greek Physicians made are definitely no longer held true:

I will provide medical education free of charge.

I will financially support my teacher in times of need.

Some are still the foundation of today's oaths:

I will only seek to benefit my patients, and not do harm.

I will speak of nothing that I learn inside a household, whether learned during treatment or not.

I will not have sex with my patients.

And the most interesting are the "no" statements.  Today's oaths largely do not have any negative statements.  They say what the physician will try to do, but do not say what the physician will refuse to do.  Probably because they were trying to avoid the controversy of:

I will not give a deadly medicine to anyone, even if I am asked.  Apparently scholars are unsure if this means no euthanasia or assisted suicide, as it is often interpreted, or is more directed at not supplying assassins.  Since we are told that there was plenty of euthanasia in Ancient Greece, either a bunch of Physicians weren't good at following instructions, or it really meant the latter.

I will not give a woman a harmful pessary.  A pessary, in my understanding, is when a sharp metal instrument is poked into the uterus to initiate an abortion.  Many people interpret this as no abortions.  However, the pessary METHOD of abortion had a ridiculously high death rate, because you just poked sharp metal things into soft tissue.  So, since again there were plenty of abortions performed in Ancient Greece, many scholars believe that this was outlawing only this method of abortion, not abortions in general.

And now you know.