Dear Editor,
For five years to date, as Registrar of the University of Guyana, I have ensured that our Health Sciences graduates (medical doctors, dentists and nurses) were allowed to take their professional oaths, publicly, at the university’s convocation ceremony.
On each of those occasions, the congregation responded amused, as if entertained, to the recital of the Hippocratic Oath by the medical doctors. Sometimes, it seemed as if the very word ‘Hippocratic’ and its adjacency to hypocrite caused the amusement, while on other occasions the last stanza: “If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art … if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot” (my emphasis), may have also caused amusement.
I was not amused but bewildered when I saw two doctors and a nurse, who would have taken the Nightingale Pledge, which in part reads: “will hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping,” on national TV, for reasons best known to themselves and their cohorts, providing full disclosure on the state of Colwyn Harding and what he confided or did not confide in them. Not to mention how prejudicial such public announcements might be to the proclaimed inquiry into the matter.
Indeed the inquiry should have right of privilege to such information, since it is Mr Harding’s complaint that would have triggered the inquiry in this instance.
The silence of the Medical Council and the Nursing Council is deafening as those under their charge take their professions to a new low in Guyana.
Or is it that I have gotten something wrong in my assertion? Or the amusement, when the oath and or pledge is recited, is in order?
Yours faithfully,
Vincent Alexander
