Debates ยท III. The Oath and the Ligature
What does the Hippocratic Oath's stone clause forbid? disputed
Positions
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A narrow ban: leave lithotomy to its practitioners
Read as Adams translated it in 1849, the physician swears not to operate on patients with stone and to leave the work to 'men who are practitioners of this work'. The clause then marks a division of labour between physicians and a separate trade. A modern paraphrase in the Didusch newsletter takes the same line: leave the procedure to specialists.
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A wider renunciation of the knife
W. H. S. Jones's 1923 Loeb translation has the physician not use the knife, 'not even, verily, on sufferers from stone'. Stone becomes the extreme case of a general refusal to cut, not the only case.
Sources
Evidence
The two public-domain translations carry the two main readings. Adams restricts the oath to cutting for stone; Jones makes the ban general, with stone named as a case that is not excepted. Riches (1967) quotes an abridged form of Jones. The film shows both translations on screen. The film also names prudence and a Pythagorean origin among the readings. The kit does not verify who proposed those readings, so they are not set out here (see GAPS.md).
Current standing
The sources in the kit set out both readings through the two translations but do not judge between them. The film concludes that the Greek will bear more than one reading and that the argument has never been settled. Later European practice, in which cutting for stone was left largely to itinerant lithotomists, fits the narrow reading but does not decide what the clause meant to its authors.