Abstract

Chinese medicine has a history of at least 2,000 years. The first explicit literature on medical ethics did not appear until the seventh century when a physician named Sun Simiao wrote a famous treatise titled “On the Absolute Sincerity of Great Physicians” in his work The Important Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold. In this treatise, later called The Chinese Hippocratic Oath, Sun Simiao required the physician to develop first a sense of compassion and piety, and then to make a commitment to try to save every living creature, to treat every patient on equal grounds, and to avoid seeking wealth because of his expertise