No, not him. The other one. No, not that one either.
Oh, come on! The one they call "the father of medicine"? The one who founded the Hippocratic School? The one who died in around 370 B.C.?
Oh, forget it. I'm talking about the one they named the Hippocratic Oath after. No, not that oath. The Hippocratic Oath doctors are supposed to follow even if they don't actually swear to it with one hand resting on a Bible.
God!
Well, the Hippocratic Oath, contrary to what some may have come to believe, does not actually contain the words "First, do no harm." It contains similar wording, though, about abstaining from causing any.
And that's where this post comes in. Because I think doctors violate their avowed prohibition against doing harm on a daily, if not hourly, basis. They violate it because, as I like to say, they are too often clever without being wise. They do the things they do because they can, in many cases, regardless of whether they should. And they are, of course, out to make a buck just like the rest of us.
So they do harm by helping a hapless single mother up her kid-count from six to 14. Because they can, and can sure use the do-re-mi.
They do harm by helping to pave the way for MRSA and other killer superbugs by over-prescribing antibiotics—when they, of all people, should readily appreciate how doing so accelerates Darwinian evolution to the benefit of microbes and detriment of humankind. Their rationale? Their patients will simply go to other doctors for the antibiotics they, the patients, believe they need. A buck's a buck, after all.
Thanks in large part to the reckless over-prescribing of antibiotics, there are microbes out there today—most of them infesting your favorite hospital, as a matter of fact—that no antibiotic, not even intravenous, can touch.
In other words, all those times your doctor coughed up a scrip for ampicillin or erythromycin or some other antibiotic when you presented yourself or your child with a viral infection and expected not to leave empty-handed, he or she was doing harm.
But being too often clever without being wise is where I think they do the most harm of all. Bear with me, please. ...
Let's set the Wayback Machine to 1962 and accompany little R. J. as he takes in a first-run screening of The Brain That Wouldn't Die, starring Herb Evers and Virginia Leith. The publicity poster in the theater lobby bears this tantalizing teaser (which contains, for the present-day R. J., a scathingly prescient commentary on modern medicine):
ALIVE ... WITHOUT A BODY ... FED BY AN UNSPEAKABLE HORROR FROM HELL!
A romance of sorts, The Brain That Wouldn't Die tells the story of Dr. Bill Cortner's devoted efforts to keep his fiancée's head alive after she literally loses it in an automobile accident. The cinematic special effects of that era were good enough for me, and I carry to this day the mental image of dear Jan Compton's living albeit detached noddle resting in a tray of liquid, secured by elaborate mechanisms, nourished and stimulated by various tubes and wires.
So. Here's this head of Jan Compton bossing Dr. Cortner around from a liquid-filled tray; and that look-ma-no-body noggin was not only the stuff of science fiction back in '62, but the stuff of ghastly science fiction whose solitary raison d'être was to shock and horrify and repel the likes of adolescent moi.
A head fed by an unspeakable horror from Hell, remember ... much as the head of poor Christopher Reeve, the late actor who starred in numerous Superman films, was kept alive atop the liquid-filled tray of a lifeless body, by the not infrequently unspeakable horror from Hell we call medical science.
Only, now we regard what once repulsed and terrified us as a miracle.
Sorry. I'm not buying it. I submit that no material difference, horrifying-wise, exists between a Jan Compton and a Christopher Reeve.
I submit that, notwithstanding his bravery and unflagging upbeat demeanor (for the cameras at least), the quadriplegic, unable-to-breathe-unaided Christopher Reeve would sooner have died that awful day he broke his neck in an equestrian event.
I submit that in cases such as his, plus countless others, the physicians' Hippocratic Oath may as well be called the Hypocritic Oath.
Watch The Brain That Wouldn't Die at the Internet Archive.
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