Letters to the Editor
vasumurti
Published Letters: 71
-
even the ancient Greeks...
[Read the article: Coat hangers and crochet hooks ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"even the ancient Greeks performed abortions," writes Tracy Clark-Flory. And even the ancient Greeks knew it was a crime.
Pythagorean science was far more theoretical than experimental. However, one of Pythagoras' students, Alcmaeon, is the first person known to have dissected a human body. He further identified arteries and veins, discovered the optic nerve and the eustachian tubes, and declared the brain to be the seat of intelligence. This final contention was denied by Aristotle, who placed intelligence in the heart. Alcmaeon also founded the science of embryology.
The Pythagoreans also contributed to medical ethics through the Oath of Hippocrates. Hippocrates was a physician who lived in the 5th century BC. In a treatise entitled “The Sacred Disease,” he maintained that epilepsy and other illnesses were not the result of evil spirits or angry gods, but due to natural causes.
Hippocrates has been called the “Father of Medicine,” the “wisest and greatest practitioner of his art,” and the “most important and most complete medical personality of antiquity.” Before Hippocrates, the physician studied plants and animals and had a working knowledge of both harmful and beneficial remedies. He could simultaneously heal some patients while killing others. Hippocrates believed in the sanctity of life and called other physicians to the highest ethical standards and conduct.
“Throughout the primitive world, the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be the same person,” observed anthropologist Margaret Mead. “He with the power to kill had the power to cure, including especially the undoing of his own killing activities. He who had the power to cure would necessarily also be able to kill.” According to Mead, the Oath of Hippocrates marked a turning point in the history of Western civilization because “for the first time in our tradition” it caused “a complete separation between curing and killing.” The Oath reads:
“I swear by Apollo Physician, by Asclepius...I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgement, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.
“Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion...Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.”
“With the Greeks,” concluded Dr. Mead, “the distinction was made clear. One profession, the followers of Asclepius, were to be dedicated completely to life under all circumstances, regardless of the rank, age, or intellect—the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor, the life of a foreign man, the life of a defective child.”
The United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, noted that the Oath of Hippocrates “echoes Pythagorean doctrines.” Dr. Herbert Ratner observes that in ancient Greece, “medicine emerged as the prototype of the learned professions. The contribution of Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was to incorporate the rights of the patient, as well as the obligations of the physician, into the Oath. Hippocrates’ profound grasp of the nature of a learned profession serving one of man’s basic needs makes the Hippocratic Oath one of the great documents and classics of man, a fact not only signified by its universal inclusion in collections of the great books of Western civilization, but by the universal veneration accorded it by physicians, singly and collectively, throughout the ages...the Oath, properly constituted, becomes the one hope of preserving the unconfused role of the physician as healer.”
At the end of the Second World War, during the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, twenty physicians were tried for crimes against humanity. In this case, the crimes were committed in the euthanasia wards and concentration camps of the Third Reich. Physicians there had become executioners as well as healers. American medical science consultant Dr. Andrew C. Ivy said, “The moral imperative of the Oath of Hippocrates I believe is necessary for the survival of the scientific and technical philosophy of medicine.”
The Oath of Hippocrates and its modern equivalent, the Declaration of Geneva, enacted by the World Medical Association in 1948, are frequently cited by the American Medical Association in its prohibition against medical participation in legally authorized executions. A code of conduct for physicians as healers, as well as concern for the rights and well-being of the patient, originated with Hippocrates and the Pythagorean tradition.