This reader makes a point:

How do we know that the Hippocratic Oath “survived” several millennia (if by this you mean that it was used in its classical form from the time it was created to sometime in the last couple of decades)? Do we know anything at all about the percentage of doctors who took the oath at the time of the birth of Christ, in 500, 1000 or 1500 A.D.? Even the website to which you link says that only about a quarter of American medical students took the oath in the 1920s. And if most doctors took the oath in 938 or 1428, did they take the same oath?

In saying that the Oath came down to us intact across several milennia, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that all physicians in all places and at all times during those many centuries had taken the Oath, but rather that the Oath had survived as a powerful ideal—and that modern western civilization, until very recently, had embraced it.

But can anyone fill me in on actual American practice? Was the Oath prevalent in this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance? By the middle of the twentieth century, it’s my impression, the Oath was used at most American medical schools, but I may be mistaken. Can anyone fill me in?