The solemn truth about medical oaths

Medical students make a variety of promises at graduation and white coat ceremonies — and even write their own oaths. What they include, from social activism to self-care, would surprise Hippocrates.

Each year, thousands of graduating medical students across the country don caps and gowns and vow to uphold the highest ideals of their new profession. The uninitiated might assume they recite the Hippocratic Oath, a venerable document enumerating ideals for physicians that dates back more than two millennia. In reality, though, that’s hardly the case.

While nearly all U.S. medical school graduations include a public promise, and some use an updated version of Hippocrates’ words, not a single student utters the original Hippocratic Oath.

Instead, today’s medical students recite a vast — and growing — range of oaths. In 2015, more than half of medical school graduations featured an oath unique to that school, compared to 9% in 1982, according to a 2017 Academic Medicine study. What’s more, students increasingly work together before graduations and white coat ceremonies to choose or craft their own oaths, creating a personalized declaration of what it means to be a physician.

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