OPINION: Whatever happened to the Hippocratic Oath?
A junior doctor's moral responsibility is to save lives not to strike and put patients at risk, writes historian Derek Taylor
Most ancient civilisations thought that if you got ill it was the curse of the gods. There was nothing you could do but suffer it. The Jews had an entirely different view; they believed that illness was a problem that had to be addressed and cured.
In the 6th century Talmud there are over 200 rules about medicine. The introduction of rules for lockdown during the recent pandemic reiterated many of the laws in the Talmud. The ancient Greeks took medicine seriously as well and one of their physicians is known for the Hippocratic oath.
Hippocrates (460 BCE- 375 BCE) is now not credited with actually writing the oath, but most doctors still take a version of it when they qualify.
One of the key principles it always enunciates is that a doctor should refrain from causing harm or hurt to patients. That seems obvious and reasonable enough and all junior doctors know that. They still come out on strike. As a result hundreds of thousands of treatments have had to be cancelled.
The Jews took a different view in biblical times and they take a different view today – which probably doesn’t make us very popular in junior doctor circles.
We have an organisation called Hatzolah which is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to take the sick to hospital whenever there is a need. It is a totally free service and it gets no government support.
All the doctors and medics involved in it are volunteers and it is to be found all over the world where there is a major Jewish community. Non-Jews can use it too. It’s about having a social conscience. In London, Hetzolah were charged and found guilty of using their horn on one occasion to speed up the journey, and the magistrate said he was sorry he had to find them guilty.
The fact that there are ambulances in London is also down to a Jewish banker in Victorian times; Henri Louis Bischofsheim, who started the ambulance service, and gave London 62 ambulances during his lifetime. Bischofsheim was appalled that poor people couldn’t get to hospital and provided the ambulances.
The junior doctors want a 35% raise which the government says is not affordable. They have made a date for further strike action. The enormous claim for a 35% increase is based on their present salaries, which haven’t kept up with inflation over the years.
Inflation however, is only one element which affects the cost of living. The increasing value of homes has often exceeded the effect of inflation. Competition has brought down the cost of many flights on planes. A great many imports from China have improved on inflation as well.
The waiting lists in the NHS are not just a bureaucratic problem. These are real people with real illnesses, and a lot of people are going to actually die because they didn’t get the treatment they needed fast enough. If you’re a junior doctor, this should be on your conscience.
Someone is unnecessarily ill because you want a 35% increase in salary. The average salary of a GP is £73,000 and a specialist £136,000, so there’s plenty for the ambitious to go for. If you choose to study medicine, however, what about the patients?
When the Labour party created the NHS after the war, they were showing that care for the poor was not just a political slogan.
For the junior doctors, it is now.
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