What Would Hippocrates Think?

Turning the calendar back to the 5^th century BCE, Hippocrates emerged as a leader in medical research and thought. Rather than turning to the gods as before, he is generally credited with using observation of the body as a basis for medical knowledge. He turned his attention to changes in diet, beneficial drugs, and strategies to keep the body in balance. The Hippocratic Corpus— the collected writings attributed to him—contains about sixty works on a variety of medical topics, including diagnosis, epidemics, obstetrics, pediatrics, nutrition, and surgery.

While there are assumed to be several additional authors scattered over several centuries, Hippocrates is considered to be the father of medicine. And because of this position, over 90% of medical students (and now nursing students) traditionally take part in some form of the Hippocratic Oath. The ritual is called the White Coat Ceremony. If you have been in a hospital you would have seen residents wearing this short coat. The long coat is reserved for M.D.s.

The Meaning of the White Coat Ceremony

 The White Coat Ceremony oath is a solemn pledge, often a version of the Hippocratic Oath, that initiates medical and healthcare students into the profession by emphasizing patient care, compassion, and ethical practice. It focuses on maintaining patient confidentiality, respecting human life, upholding the honor of the profession, and prioritizing the well-being of patients above all else. 

Georgetown University, for example, states that “The white coat of the medical student, the resident, or the physician can be many things to the wearer as well as to the beholder.  It lends itself to diverse meanings, interpretations, and functions.  It can be experienced as an almost magical conveyor of status and a signal as to the wearer’s place in the hierarchy of medicine.  It can serve the utilitarian function of protecting the garments beneath it, while its pockets strain with instruments, pens, and small books.”

While some schools use the traditional Hippocratic oath, many have adopted modern, modified versions to reflect contemporary ethical, social, and professional responsibilities, including addressing structural inequities. The simple “Do No Harm” (not actually in the Oath) has been altered and updated.

The Oath versus Reality

Princeton Professor Uwe Reinhart was one of the nation’s leading health care economists. He wrote late in his career: “If you go through medical schools right now in the U.S, you will hear in every single medical school, long speeches about health equity, health justice, how this is what our institution is designed to serve. And then you go to work in the hospital and you see this—the actual policies that dictate who comes into this hospital, what kind of care they get, what kind of aftercare they don’t get. It’s not guided by the ideas of health equity or health justice or even care.

“These young doctors are going to enter into a practice most likely that is owned and/or report to a larger organization, rarely their own private practice. They will be part of a for-profit hospital if they have a high-priced specialty. But they will still bend the knee to administrators who are staring all day at the bottom line, squeezing patients while pursuing profits. New doctors will join their colleagues in the less-lofty role of well-paid, modern-day serfs paying allegiance to powerful masters but called the uniquely American medical system.”

Another contemporary take on the Hippocratic Oath comes from Dr. Aaron Kheriaty in his book Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine. “Hippocrates understood a basic truth that many in medicine have forgotten: The patient is the primary healer; the physician occupies merely a supporting role. . . This is why Hippocrates always began treatment with an individualized ‘regimen’ of diet, physical activity, rest, and reprieve in the proper environment, and so on. During medical school, I was taught a great deal about fighting disease but almost nothing about promoting health.”

Dr. Kheriaty’s book is a personal account of his journey to become a well-regarded physician specializing in psychiatry. He is currently, after sixteen years at the UCI School of Medicine, the director of the program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethic and Public Policy Center.

The new Hippocratic Society

At the end of the book, relating to Hippocrates, Dr. Kheriaty reveals that he has joined with several other medical professionals to form the Hippocratic Society. The Society is a community of medical students and practitioners seeking to live up to their healing profession. Their Mission is to form and sustain  clinicians in their practice and pursuit of good medicine. There are already over forty chapters in the U.S. and abroad since its formation in 2025.

Here is a brief overview from their website: https://hippsoc.org/

• A focus on cultivating virtues that characterize good medical practitioners.
• In contrast to doing the bidding of third parties and setting aside clinical judgment, we seek to discern and do what good medicine requires, thereby fulfilling our healing profession.
• Today’s corporatization of healthcare treats practitioners as interchangeable “providers” who are expected to “just do your job,” contributing to a crisis of medical morale. In contrast, we embrace medicine as a sacred profession, and we help medical practitioners to flourish in serving their patient’s genuine good.

How the Hippocratic Society carries out its mission is in two primary ways.

1. Moral and Professional Training. It promotes the moral and professional formation of its members from premedical training onward. “In dialogue with seminal texts from the arts and humanities, they contemplate the nature of the human person and of human health, learning to orient and integrate the use of medical science and technology.”
2. Serious and Open Discourse. The Society also sponsors fair, serious, and open discourse about the most important questions facing medical practitioners in our time. Against the tendency in academia to ignore or suppress disagreement and dissent, the Hippocratic Society promotes public dialogue about difficult questions, confident that by reasoning together medical practitioners can discern better how to serve our patients and fulfill our profession.

“Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.” -Hippocrates

In working on my as yet unpublished memoir about my time and later research into the broken American healthcare system, I’ve read over 100 articles/books. But I’ve never read a book as interesting and thought provoking as Making the Cut. I will be basing several posts on his book in the next few months.