Working for peace through health--ethical values and principles.

Health professionals have wrestled with their ethical guiding principles for millennia. The sonorous oath of Hippocrates (470-410 BC) has echoed through the ages and undergone many revisions to devise an oath of ethics relevant to modern health practice. In some cases, there is no longer an oath, but a booklet or manual to guide the practitioner (1-3). There are specialists in medical ethics, institutions dedicated to the issue, and journals of medical ethics. This is as it should be in an arena of work in which there is access to patients’ bodies and to their secrets, and the capacity to save lives or cause loss of life.