# The U.S. National Library of Medicine publishes a public Hippocratic Oath page in Greek Medicine Date: 2002 ## The fact By 2002 the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division was publishing a public English presentation of the Hippocratic Oath inside its Greek Medicine series, with a translation and a warning that the text is traditional rather than a verified autograph. The page is a completed public-history instrument. It is not a new oath. It is not a medical licence. National Library of Medicine publishes a public Hippocratic Oath page in Greek Medicine (2002-01-01). ## Context Medical schools had long printed oaths in commencement booklets. NLM’s page mattered because a national library put a standard translation and a corpus caveat in one stable URL. Attribution remains disputed: many scholars treat the Oath as one treatise among others, not as [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates)’ personal contract. The page records that dispute instead of hiding it. Hippocrates of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources The NLM Greek Medicine oath page is the official public text. Britannica’s oath article independently describes the oath as a later-attributed document with mixed manuscript history and modern replacements such as the Declaration of Geneva. Official or archival record: NLM — The Hippocratic Oath (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html; U.S. National Library of Medicine). ## Significance Knowledge-access path for professional ethics. Complex contribution. High confidence on the page, low on any clinical effect. Public access to an oath can support teaching and also freeze a text whose clauses on surgery, abortion, and secrecy have been used in opposite political directions. Those later uses are separate Facts. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: NLM published a public oath page in its Greek Medicine series. Not established: that Hippocrates composed the oath, or that reading the page changes bedside conduct. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. National Library of Medicine publishes a public Hippocratic Oath page in Greek Medicine (2002-01-01). ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access ## Sources - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hippocratic-oath - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/us-nlm-hippocratic-oath-greek-medicine