# The World Medical Association adopts the Declaration of Geneva Date: 1948 ## The fact In September 1948 the World Medical Association adopted the Declaration of Geneva, a physician’s pledge drafted as a modern successor to the Hippocratic Oath after the Second World War and the Nuremberg medical trial. The text requires the physician to put the patient’s health first and not to use medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity. It is a completed association policy. It is not a statute in every country and not a criminal judgment. ## Context Nazi medical crimes had shown that a traditional oath did not stop state-directed killing dressed as hygiene. The WMA’s answer was a new pledge, not an archaeological reconstruction of a Coan text. Later revisions (notably 2017) changed wording on teacher respect, autonomy, and discrimination. This Fact is the 1948 adoption, not the 2017 revision. [Hippocrates](/people/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 WMA publishes the declaration as a current policy document with history. Independent medical-ethics literature indexed by NCBI treats Geneva as a postwar replacement oath, distinct from the Greek text. Official or archival record: WMA Declaration of Geneva (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-geneva/; World Medical Association). ## Significance Rights-facing professional ethics path. Complex contribution. Medium confidence on later implementation, high on the 1948 vote. A pledge can be recited and ignored. Nuremberg had already shown that. Later Facts record specific violations and specific research codes. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: the WMA adopted the Declaration of Geneva in 1948. Not established: that every physician swore it, or that Hippocrates authored its clauses. 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. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights ## Sources - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513235/ - https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-geneva/ ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/wma-declaration-of-geneva-1948