Published in The Foundations of Bioethics

Keywords: Autonomy, Bioethics, Hippocratic Oath, Professional Code, Sacredness of Life.

This work shows the actuality of the Hippocratic Oath in contemporary days, especially in Bioethics. The great benefices and challenges imposed by the medical science and technology advancement cannot be underestimated. There is a great gap between a highly technic and pragmatic biomedicine and a true humanizing medicine. In the last decades, the risky human experimentation and the medical technology improvement increased even more the risks, the challenges and the conflicts that threat the great ethical values already historically consecrated. The Ethical Medics were reduced to the professional Code, and Deontology itself could not answer to moral conflicts and antagonisms between different philosophical traditions. Bioethics, as a philosophy of biomedical practice and investigation, actually is the space of such discussion, and has in the Hippocratic Oath the origin of its principles and issues. Among the ethical principles in the Oath, the sacredness of life appears as a compromise solemnly proclaimed, without any concession to abortion or euthanasia. Even if such questions are categorically portrayed in the Oath, they remain highly controversial in Bioethics, if we take into account the contemporary interpretation given to principles like autonomy and liberty of the individual. The contemporary ethical pluralism allows different pathways to highly conflictive questions that were already points of conflict in Ancient Greece. Although the controversies of historical and conceptual nature seem to compromise the Hippocratic tradition prestige, its prescriptions cannot be left aside when controversial questions in the fields of Ethics, Science and Medical Technology are raised in the Academy. Although twenty-five centuries separate the Hippocratic Oath from the contemporary Bioethics, the history of medicine shows that it is in this new field of knowledge that the relevance of that ancient text appears. Judged as conservative or even anachronic by some and as an ethical parameter of great importance by others, the Hippocratic Oath still remains as a millenary reference in the ethical stance adopted by Health professionals; and this happens always when such professionals are confronted with the risks, challenges and moral conflicts generated by science and medical technology.