Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Hippocratic Oath.
The Greek physician Hippocrates, active in the fifth century BC, has been
described as the father of medicine, although little is known about his life and
some scholars even argue that he was not one person but several. A large body of
work originally attributed to him, the Hippocratic Corpus, was disseminated
widely in the ancient world, and contains treatises on a wide variety of
subjects, from fractures to medical ethics.
Today we know that the Hippocratic Corpus cannot have been written by a
single author. But many of its texts shaped Western medicine for centuries. The
best known is the Hippocratic Oath, an ethical code for doctors. Celebrated in
the ancient world, and later referred to by Arabic scholars, it offers medics
guidance on how they should behave. Although it has often been revised and
adapted, the Hippocratic Oath remains one of the most significant and best known
documents of medical science - but there is little evidence that it was
routinely sworn by doctors until modern times.
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