ABSTRACT
Except for the Bible, no document and no author from Antiquity commands the authority in the twenty-first century of Hippocrates of Cos and the Hippocratic Oath.1 They are regularly cited in both learned journals and the popular press as the standard of ethical conduct to which all practising physicians should adhere. In medical schools around the world students give assent to principles and words they believe go back to the Father of Medicine, and in the eyes of their prospective patients failure to live up to his prescriptions for competence and morality is the greatest of all medical sins. Revised, bowdlerised, set to music and made into a CD-Rom, updated or denounced, the Oath has made Hippocrates a familiar name even today, appealed to as the creator of the modern medical profession.2 It may then come as a shock to learn that almost nothing is known of Hippocrates himself, that he is unlikely personally to have devised the Oath, and that several passages in the Hippocratic Corpus describe practices that would have involved a doctor in breaking it, even assuming that he ever had sworn it, which is itself unlikely.3
