The idea of reviewing the ethical concerns of ancient medicine with an
eye as to how they might instruct us about the extremely lively disputes
of our own contemporary medicine is such a natural one that it surprises
us to real- ize how very slow we have been to pursue it in a sustained
way_ Ideologues have often seized on the very name of Hippocrates to
close off debate about such matters as abortion and euthanasia - as if
by appeal to a well-known and sacred authority that no informed person
would care or dare to oppose_ And yet, beneath the polite fakery of
such reference, we have deprived our- selves of a familiarity with the
genuinely 'unsimple' variety of Greek and Roman reflections on the great
questions of medical ethics. The fascination of recovering those views
surely depends on one stunning truism at least: humans sicken and die;
they must be cared for by those who are socially endorsed to specialize
in the task; and the changes in the rounds of human life are so much the
same from ancient times to our own that the disputes and agreements of
the past are remarkably similar to those of our own.