Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

164 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Marble disk commemorating a physician.
they possess anything resembling a medical license. Medical students
attached themselves to established practitioners on a purely
informal basis. Once they had acquired sufficient knowledge, they
discharged themselves and were free to practice independently. The
success of their careers would have depended on the size of their
reputation, which means that the most successful of them must have
been assiduous self-promoters. Given the absence of any objective
criteria for determining commonly agreed-upon standards of medical
competence, it is hardly surprising that allegations of charlatanism
and quackery are commonplace in medical texts.
The Hippocratic Oath
Although anyone could claim to possess healing skills, some
physicians organized themselves into guilds and agreed to abide
by prescribed rules of medical conduct. The most important evidence
for this is the famous Hippocratic Oath, which is attributed
to Hippokrates himself and remained the cornerstone of medical
ethics in the West until recently. Although we do not know what
proportion of the medical profession observed it, those who took
the oath seem to have constituted a “closed shop,” since they swore
to divulge their professional knowledge only to a select few.
The Hippocratic Oath reads as follows:
I swear by Apollo the healer and Asklepios and Hygieia [wife of Asklepios,
the personification of health] and Panakeia [daughter of Asklepios, per-