John Young

“ It was easier then than now, for the physician had the drugs, and the pessaries were a bit of cloth over the finger, and dipped in irritating or astringent substances. The prohibition is a wide one, and might perhaps be renewed with advantage. When pregnancy is not dishonourable, abortion is now resorted to reluctantly and after deliberation, the more trustworthy that its induction is in the hands of the practitioner. No doubt there are men willing to gratify patients by ridding them of an inconvenient responsibility, as there are who aid in the concealment of immorality. ”

“ It is a lofty honour which leaves unsaid what might harm any one, be he sick or whole. This aspect of professional secrecy is not sufficiently prominent in the comments on questions affecting the duty of practitioners. The church catechism asks the youth to "keep his tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering," and if the author or compilers of the Oath had expanded their views we should probably have had the same suggestive collocation. So there is a chance of the medical man "enjoying his life and art in happiness, and having credit among all men for all time." ”

“ The Asclepiad key-note is struck when the teacher is acknowledged as in a quasi-parental relation, in Hippocrates' case it was one of real paternity—when responsibility for his maintenance is accepted, and his children, at least his sons, are adopted as brothers. They are to receive gratuitous uncovenanted instruction, and no one beyond the circle of brotherhood by the flesh or by adoption is to be initiated in the art unless he covenants and swears himself into the confraternity. ”

“ Of all arts (it says) medicine is the noblest, yet on account of the ignorance of those who practise it and of those who judge regarding them, it is held inferior to all arts, of which error the chief cause seems to be that in towns there is no punishment, that medicine alone is exempt from punishment save disgrace, and this little affects those also who in deed seem very like the masks of tragedy, which are not the actors: just as there are many physicians in name, very few in fact. ”

“ But the need of care in regulating diet in the Hippocratic wide sense was justly insisted on. We know that a convalescent from typhoid may be killed by so innocent an article as a custard: ancient cooking offered a good many even more noxious substances, fraught with equal danger to a delicate stomach, while unwise bathing or inopportune exercise might upset the balance of not too stable health. The treatises De Balneis abounded, and their perusal makes one wonder how, dietary holding so many traps and atmospheric germs so many more, the human race has survived. ”

“ Christianity which did not exclude poisons from the Vatican cannot afford to say much regarding a not uncommon Eastern solution of difficulties: the counsel, συμβουλίη, as a preliminary, suggests the existence of men against whom the lofty principles of the Oath were a needful protest and protection. ”

“ But Hippocrates deals with surgical questions in a way which proves operative familiarity. No one who had not operated could have laid down the precautions he rightly urges. Lithotomy was an old operation; no one is spoken of as its inventor. ”

“ The Oath of Hippocrates is a document of high antiquity, probably of pre-Hippocratic age. It contains reference to some similar formula pre-existent which exercised restraint on intrants to the profession, to the Art, τέχνη, which we have no equivalent, since the Greeks did not then cut the profession into two—theoretical and practical. The phrase from Aristophanes cited by Littré, Adams, and others indicates that the formula was even popularly familiar. ”

“ At that time the physician gave out the drugs from his private stores, and thus might, without detection, do evil. Next came the stage when each physician had his own formulæ, and so restricted his patients to those acquainted with these formulæ, to whom indeed he had assigned the monopoly. The practice still survives: "Prescription No. 1" is not an utterly unknown formula whereby practitioner and drug-seller are partners, a custom against which prohibitive regulations are ineffectual. ”

“ The removal of the conception was objectionable only after it had acquired life, and Aristotle so distinguishes the innocence or criminality of the act. The Oath seems to contemplate criminal abortion, the destruction of the fœtus when there was no danger to the mother's life. ”

“ The Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons still appoint Inspectors of Drugs, who, even in the days when their power was more absolute, could not altogether prevent curious pharmacy. An old practitioner in the West recently told of a candidate who "knew how ipecacuan was made": "half an ounce of tartar emetic to a pound of pease meal." This represented the practical mode of pharmacy in the eastern part of a large town. ”