Medicine · The great ideas

What does a healer owe to the sick? The physician’s duty is the set of obligations a healer takes on toward his patients, his craft and life itself. These readings ask for whose good the physician acts, what he must refuse to do and what honour his work deserves.

The Oath, in the Hippocratic collection, is the pledge by which a physician binds himself to his teachers, his patients and his art. In this part he promises a “regimen” for “the benefit of my patients”, and to give no “deadly medicine” and no “pessary to produce abortion”. The Oath was long the declaration administered to those entering the profession. It stands under “The physician’s duty” as the oldest statement of it.

The treatise called The Law, in the Hippocratic collection, opens by calling medicine “of all the Arts the most noble” and complains that in the cities “there is no punishment” for its bad practice “except disgrace”. The treatise is short and concerns the standing of the art and the training of the physician. The passage stands under “The physician’s duty” as the Hippocratic statement of the dignity of the art.

In Book I of the Republic, Socrates argues against Thrasymachus that no physician, “in so far as he is a physician”, considers his own good but “the good of his patient”, and likens the physician to a “ruler”. The argument is part of the discussion of justice that opens the dialogue. The passage stands under “The physician’s duty” as the place where Plato makes the physician the example of an art that serves its subject.

In the thirty-eighth chapter of the Book of Ecclesiasticus, in the Douay-Rheims text, the sacred writer says “Honour the physician for the need thou hast of him: for the most High hath created him”, and that “all healing is from God”. The book, called Sirach in modern editions, is one of the Sapiential books. The passage stands under “The physician’s duty” as the scriptural counsel on the physician.

In section 89 of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae of John Paul II (1995), on the value and inviolability of human life, the Pope addresses “health-care personnel”, whose “profession calls for them to be guardians and servants of human life”. The section belongs to the part of the encyclical on the Gospel of life in the life of the Church. It stands under “The physician’s duty” as the Church’s own statement of it.