'First do no harm' revisited

摘要

Clinicians of every ilk enjoy aphorisms. Favourites include "time is brain" and "common things are common." Yet, surely no medical saying is better known than "first do no harm" or, to use the Latin phrase, "primum non nocere." PubMed shows that there are currently 393 articles with "do no harm" in the title. Contrary to popular belief the phrase does not appear in the Hippocratic Oath orthe Hippocratic corpus (Hippocrates wrote in Greek, not Latin). Ratherthe saying is attributed to Thomas Inman, as recently as I860.That same year Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior famously remarked in a lecture to the Massachusetts Medical Society, "If the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunkto the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind-and all the worse forthe fishes. He observed thatthe injuries caused by overmedication were often masked by the disease.