Abigail Rubio: Changing the Medical School Oath to Address Racism

Abigail Rubio, like all medical students, started her journey to be a doctor with an oath. In the traditional Hippocratic Oath, future physicians pledge to do no harm, treat people not symptoms, and respect patient privacy. This sets the tone for medical students’ time in school, as well as their practice later. But Rubio knew something was missing from the oath. She and her peers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, with the guidance of their faculty advisers, wrote their own medical oath and recited it in August 2020 with new emphasis on COVID-19, health care inequities, and racism as a public health crisis. This is part of a rising trend of medical students writing their own oaths on their ever-evolving responsibilities as doctors to address systemic ...
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