Abstract

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.Your burden is not to clear your conscience but to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.Since the time of hippocrates, Western medicine has assumed that the exercise of conscience is fundamental to its sound practice. Despite significant changes to medical training in the intervening millennia, this emphasis on conscience remains. "The Physician's Pledge" of the World...