The Hippocratic Oath and the Terminally Ill

December 29, 2014

(Los Angeles Times) – The Hippocratic oath, a roughly 2,000-year-old text with only marginal relevance to medicine today, continues to have an outsize influence on us. The oath’s language and many of its components are more archaic than a washboard. A modern surgeon is not going to swear by Apollo. Nor is he going to teach “without reward” or pledge to comport himself “in a godly manner.”