Hippocratic Oath

To paraphrase the Hippocratic Oath, the first rule of environmental monitoring should be to do no harm. Sampling in a effort to detect microorganisms should not increase the potential for contamination of sterile materials. 

When doctors take the Hippocratic oath, they promise to not make the patient any sicker than they already were. Technicians should take a similar oath. It all boils down to, If it ain t broke, don t fix it. When you troubleshoot, make one change at a time. If the change doesn t solve the problem, change it back to its original state before making a different change. 

Medicine is an art that has been practiced since time immemorial. The use of herbs and natural medicaments to relieve pain or to aid the sick in coping with their afflictions has been a part of all societies. In the Western world, medicine has developed at least since the time of the Greeks and Romans - the Hippocratic oath reminds us of this nearly 2500-year history. However, the progress of medicine has been very different from that of many other arts within society. It has come of age after an incredibly long maturation period. As a function capable of offering a successful treatment for a human ailment, medicine is very much a development of the last 100-150 years. Indeed, the major advances have come in the last 50-75 years. 

The following is the translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein, The Hippocratic Oath Text, Translation, and Interpretation (Baltimore Johns Hopkins Press, 1943). 

MEDICAL ETHICS AND CODE OF CONDUCT BEYOND THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH... 

Such recent practice also seems far from what Hippocrates had in mind in advancing medical knowledge. In order to illustrate the value of IT in protecting human rights, it is useful to start with a more detailed review of the twentieth and twenty-first century status of the Hippocratic Oath. Although this Oath governs the practice of physicians, and is less obviously a key matter for medical technology, it was until recently the sole ethical directive. 

The earliest form of the Hippocratic Oath was not as strong as modern public opinion, on the matter of privacy. Privacy possibly did not matter so much in ancient times when staying alive was the imperative, and everybody in the village knew everyone else s business anyway. When in modem times... 

Parallel to many technological developments, the twentieth century saw an evolution of medical ethics and medical legislation that went way beyond the content of the Hippocratic Oath. The need for all these considerations was precisely because the Hippocratic Oath provided no guidance to twentieth and early twenty-first century issues, such as the patient s rights, the ethics of experimentation, team care, and a medical researcher s or healthcare practitioner s societal or legal responsibilities. 

In consequence of the preceding discussion, we can construct a medical researcher s counterpart of the Hippocratic Oath ... 

The crime of the Nazi physicians was an offense only from the point of view of a nontotalitarian medical ethic. It was to reaffirm the primacy of the patient-physician relationship over the state-physician relationship that the Geneva version of the Hippocratic Oath was formulated shortly after the Nuremberg trials. This oath, adopted by the World Medical Organization, explicitly commands the physician to honor the following principles ... 

With human rights abuses such as these, there is more than enough justification to continue to legislate against abuse or at least to try to define what is unethical. The Nuremberg Code formed the basis of the Declaration of Geneva Physician s Oath (1948). This was adopted by General Assembly of the newly formed World Medical Association (WMA). It was looked on as a modernization of the Hippocratic Oath and was an attempt to focus the individual physician s attention on medical ethics. 

The engineer s creed, which was adopted by NSPE in 1954, is a statement of belief, similar to the Hippocratic oath taken by medical practitioners. It was developed to state the engineering philosophy of service in a brief way. The NSPE engineer s creed is ... 

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