Justice and the Individual in the Hippocratic Tradition

Abstract

Among the many striking features of modern medicine is one that has rarely received its due, save by those specialists in the arcane and remote: medical historians. Medicine is a profoundly historical enterprise, deeply marked by and in continuous, if only implicit, dialogue with its own history. Historical reflection on medicine is therefore an especially compelling undertaking. A case in point: scratch almost any physician today and you find an abiding commitment to “Hippocmtic morality.”