Ethics
Ethics
by Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt
Of all the secular disciplines, it is perhaps medicine which has developed the most elaborate system of – and which places the most emphasis on – its own professional ethics.
Arabic medical writing, which invoked the classical authorities Hippocrates and Galen, frequently reflected on the supreme value of human health. These writings invested a unique degree of responsibility in the physician – acting both for the health and life of his patient and in the interest of the patient’s family and of society in general – and a particular ‘nobility’ (sharaf) in the art of medicine. As in classical antiquity, the scholarly physician operating in classical Islamic times was expected not only to have mastered a set of medical handbooks and to gain continually in practical experience, but also to have acquainted himself with a canon of ethical standards and codes of conduct. The famous Hippocratic Oath, the charter of medical ethics ascribed to the founder of medicine, and the so-called Testament of Hippocrates were well known throughout the history of medicine, and they act as the most fundamental witnesses for the presence of Greek concepts in Islamic medicine. In the Arabic version of the Hippocratic Oath, preserved in a seventh/thirteenth-century history of Arabic physicians, we read that the student of medicine pledges to honour his teacher as his father and his teacher’s family as his own family, and to share with them livelihood and medical instruction...
Left: A manuscript from al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt dipicting cuppring performed by a charlatan.
The specific demands on the professional performance of the ideal physician found their counterpart in the figure of the incompetent practitioner or the quack, both of which categories were united in their greed for money. In medical literature, as well as in popular gossip, the physician who did not meet the scholarly and ethical standards of his profession was the target of invective and ridicule: people ‘enjoyed telling about the comparison of physician and painter to make the point that physicians bury their dead and their mistakes remain undisclosed’, and they made fun of a doctor who felt the left side of his patient and pronounced his liver affected, saying that it was not so bad, whereupon ‘the patient exclaimed that he would rather die than go through life as someone who differed from all other people in having his liver on the left side’ (see Rosenthal 1969). More serious than these accusations against individual practitioners were attacks against medicine as such. Such attacks might be levelled on a religious basis: practising medicine would indicate a fundamental lack of true religious faith – God alone can heal the sick...
Right: Three physicians in conversation from a 13th-century miniature from a translation of Dioscordies's "De Materia Medica"
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"Ethics" by Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt
~ Chapter Thirteen, Pages 130-135 ~
~ Chapter Thirteen, Pages 130-135 ~
1001 Cures Book tells the fascinating story of how generations of physicians from different countries and creeds created a medical tradition admired by friend and foe. It influences the fates and fortunes of countless human beings, both East and West.