Hippocratic Oaths

Knowledge – articulated or propositional awareness formulated into factual information and abstract general principles – is utterly different from the sentience that all conscious animals (including human beings) possess.

It is hardly surprising, then, that truly scientific medicine is less than a hundred years old.

There is therefore a paradox: as medicine-takers we are not organisms but complex selves; but the effectiveness of the medicine we take is owed to a view of ourselves as organisms

from their biology.

medicine’s triumphs are rooted in a biological understanding of sickness while the science, the art, the humanity of medical care is a supreme expression of the distance of humans

therapeutic action draws on fathomless

aquifers of implicit knowledge, understanding, custom and practice.

What is more, it is part of a tapestry of social arrangements ensuring the dissemination of expertise in the prescription and administration of medicines, involving the division and sub-division of labour, the development of institutions, the creation of numerous forms of material infrastructure, and networks of agreements based on trust or contracts.

Osler’s assertion: there is a vast cultural hinterland to the popping of the most ordinary pill.

Hippocratic Oaths does not pretend be a comprehensive account of medicine or even of its current troubles.