# The World Medical Association revises the Declaration of Geneva Date: 2017 ## The fact On 14 October 2017 the WMA’s General Assembly in Chicago adopted a revised Declaration of Geneva. New wording emphasised patient autonomy, respect for teachers and students, and non-discrimination. It is a completed association amendment. It does not rewrite the Greek oath and does not bind non-members as a court would. ## Context Critics of older pledges said they were paternalist and silent on discrimination. The 2017 text moved toward autonomy language familiar from late-twentieth-century bioethics. Physicians’ associations still control recitation. States still control licences. Hippocratic confidentiality remains in the background, not as a voted clause from Cos. 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 WMA’s policy page carries the current text. JAMA published an independent contemporaneous explanation of the 2017 changes. Official or archival record: WMA Declaration of Geneva (current text including 2017 revision) (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-geneva/; World Medical Association). ## Significance Strengthening rights language inside professional ethics. Medium confidence on bedside effect. A revised pledge can be printed and ignored. Specific discrimination cases after 2017 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: WMA revised Geneva in October 2017. Not established: that every member recites the new text, or that [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) required autonomy as now defined. 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 - Social Cohesion: https://factrail.ai/drivers/social-cohesion ## Sources - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2656876 - https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-geneva/ ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/wma-geneva-revision-2017