The Portzebie Papers
The recent brouhaha over medical students in a Tamil Nadu college reciting the Charaka Shapath instead of the regular Hippocratic oath has taken my news feed by storm. Some people are horrified, saying that the Sanskrit oath is regressive and has no place in modern medical practice. Others opine that it is desirable to break free from western norms and make Ayurveda great again, by returning to ancient Indian texts and traditions. The hapless Dean of the college, who claims that he had no idea this was going on, has been suspended.
One of the passages from the Charaka Shapath that has sparked the greatest outrage is one that can be loosely translated as “I will not treat a female patient unless her husband or other male relative is present”. Progressives have lambasted this particular bit, pointing out (quite rightly) that if doctors were to take this oath, a woman needing an emergency appendectomy would have to wait until her husband (or father or brother or son) returned from a business trip to Europe before receiving treatment — leading to undesirable consequences such as hugely inflated hospital bills, several days of extreme agony, or even death in case the poor husband’s flight is delayed by a few hours. It simply won’t do.
