Amid a raging controversy over first-year students of Medical College Hospital, Kolkata being administered the new `Charak’ oath, Dr Raghunath Mishra, principal of the prestigious college on Tuesday said it was a mistake arising from a misunderstood communication. The clarification came a day after first-year students of the 187-year-old medical college were asked to take the `’Charak Shapath’ (oath named after the author of an ancient Indian medical text), proposed by the National Medical Council, instead of the traditional Hippocratic Oath.
“A few days back, there was a video conference with officials of NMC. During that conference there was a reference to Charak Shapath. Our staff and officials misunderstood it as an official guideline (to be compulsorily followed) and administered it on first-year students,” Mishra told PTI. ”It was a mistake on our part … we misunderstood the reference to be an official guideline,” he said.
The NMC, the regulator for medical education that replaced the Medical Council of India two years back, had some weeks ago suggested that medical colleges should replace the traditional Hippocratic Oath by the Charak Oath drawn from an ancient text `Charak Samhita’ (Charak’s text).
The Principal said interns are normally administered the Hippocratic Oath, a centuries-old code of ethics for medical practitioners worldwide, which asks doctors to pledge beneficial treatment, to refrain rom causing harm and to maintain secrecy of a patient’s confidences.
“There has never been any instance where we have administered Charak oath. We only follow the centuries-old system of administering Hippocratic Oath,” the principal said. The initial proposal by NMC had seen many doctors and others protesting that a hallowed tradition followed internationally was being sought to be replaced by a new oath based on Shlokas merely to pander to certain ideologies.
Though many other medical practitioners saw no harm in changing the tradition. On Tuesday, the Medical Service Centre, an organisation of doctors and the Democratic Students Organisation (DSO) unit of Calcutta Medical College threatened to launch a protest against the ’Charak” oath which students of the first year were forced to swear by.
“It is against the spirit of long-established conventions of the medical profession where student interns take the Hippocratic oath. This is an effort to impose a theory propagated by RSS and BJP,” secretary of Medical Service Centre Dr Angshuman Mitra said. All-India DSO Medical unit spokesperson Dr Soumyadip Roy told PTI, “we are stunned how this could happen in a premier medical college of the country.” He said the forum would submit a deputation to the Medical College against the decision.
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