Abstract
In my first year of medical school, we had a lecture by a surgeon. This was a treat for freshman medical students in the late 1950s—to have a talk by a real doctor, one who actually saw patients. The surgeon began the much- anticipated lecture by writing on the blackboard, in very large letters: “Primum non nocere!” This was my first medical aphorism. Of course, I wondered at the time why he couldn’t have written “First, do no harm” in English, especially since—as I will discuss below—the saying is frequently attributed to Hippocrates, who lived on the island of Kos, spoke Greek, and probably didn’t know Latin at all.
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Taylor, R.B. (2008). Medical Aphorisms. In: White Coat Tales. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73080-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73080-6_7
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