An East Greek Gravestone For A Doctor, about 500 B.C. Two metal 'cups' hang in the background. Heated and applied to the flesh,
they drew evil humours and pains from the body: a commonly applied remedy in antiquity and not forgotten to the present day.
Many of the early treatises show attempts by doctors to distinguish their profession from the activities of natural philosophers,
sophists, and 'irrational medicine'-magicians, sorcerers, and quacks; although they regarded themselves as a guild under the
protection of Asclepius, there is virtually no recourse to divine explanations for illness or cure, and one is left puzzled about the
relationship between the medical profession and the various healing cults (involving incubation, dream therapy, incantation, prayer,
holy water, and various non-rational types of cure), which are usually associated with Asclepius or other healing gods: perhaps the
two attitudes to medicine coexisted in much the same way as orthodox medicine and homeopathy today-the more rationally, since it
is surprising that scientific medicine could survive at all in a world where it must have seemed so much less effective than belief.
The Hippocratic Oath embodies the principles of that new medicine, and reveals its organization:
I will pay the same respect to my master in the Science as to my parents and share my life with him and pay all my debts to him. I
will regard his sons as my brothers and teach them the Science, if they desire to learn it, without fee or contract. I will hand on
precepts, lectures, and all other learning to my sons, to those of my master, and to those pupils duly apprenticed and sworn, and to
none other ....
The conception of medicine as a craft to be learned by apprenticeship or heredity has fused with the conception of medicine as a
body of scientific knowledge and as a moral way of life; it is not surprising that this oath and the attitudes it enshrines have remained
central to the practice of medicine down to our own day.