About
The Hippocratic Society is a community of medical students and practitioners together seeking to live up to their healing profession.
Our mission
Forming and sustaining clinicians in the practice and pursuit of good medicine.
Renewal starts at home
Today's medical education largely ignores the task of moral formation. In contrast, we focus on cultivating virtues that characterize good medical practitioners.
Good medicine requires good judgement
Today's medical ethics often asks us to set aside clinical judgment in service to patient autonomy and the expectations of third parties. In contrast, we seek to discern and do what good medicine requires, thereby fulfilling our healing profession.
Good medicine is its own reward
Today's corporatization of healthcare treats practitioners as interchangeable "providers" who are expected to "just do your job", contributing to a crisis of medical morale. In contrast, we embrace medicine as a sacred profession, and we help medical practitioners to flourish in serving their patient's genuine good.
Methods
The Hippocratic Society carries out its mission in two primary ways.
Moral and professional training
The Hippocratic Society promotes the moral and professional formation of medical practitioners through training seminar series in our chapters. Each seminar series calls focused attention on exemplars of virtues such as courage, generosity, and veracity, while they practice cultivating such virtues in themselves and others. Recognizing the fundamentally interpersonal and communal character of healthcare, our seminars especially contextualize the nature of the human person and of human health, learning to orient and integrate the care of medical science and technology.
Serious and open discourse
The Society also sponsors free, serious, and open discourse about the most important questions facing medical practitioners in our time. In addition to the seminar series, which features open disagreement and dissent, the Hippocratic Society promotes public dialogue about difficult questions, confident that by reasoning together practitioners will ultimately discover and live by the patterns and fulfill our profession.
I f we succeed, by 2035 every major academic medical center will have an active chapter of the Hippocratic Society. A dense network of senior clinicians will serve as mentors to trainees, and a parallel network of clinician chapters will support practitioners across the United States and beyond.
Through the hippsoc.org portal, trainees and clinicians will access a rich set of resources for the practice and pursuit of good medicine. These include: facilitation guides for running local seminars, book and article recommendations, podcasts, and records of our conferences and public events.
The success of the Hippocratic Society will be measured not only by the number of chapters created, but also by the personal and professional transformation of those who participate—demonstrated in increased satisfaction and retention in clinical practice, along with a renewed sense of purpose and meaning.
Timeline
An Idea Emerged
A number of physicians consider forming an association to recover and renew the commitment to medicine as a healing practice profession for Society for Just Medicine.
An Idea Emerged
A number of physicians consider forming an association to recover and renew the commitment to medicine as a healing practice profession for Society for Just Medicine.
Forum Founded with Grant
Hippocratic Forum received a grant from the Beatrice Institute in Higher Education and supported by the methodology of humanities. Podcasts launched. Distributed by one of medical trainees and rotating interns.
Forum Founded with Grant
Hippocratic Forum received a grant from the Beatrice Institute in Higher Education and supported by the methodology of humanities. Podcasts launched. Distributed by one of medical trainees and rotating interns.
Undergrad Seminar Launched
Partnered with the Newman Guide, a 12-week undergraduate pre-medical seminar at Abigail Adams Institute. Podcast episodes released on all major platforms.
Undergrad Seminar Launched
Partnered with the Newman Guide, a 12-week undergraduate pre-medical seminar at Abigail Adams Institute. Podcast episodes released on all major platforms.
First Chapter Launched at Wash U.
With support of Subscribe, gatherings host to other ideas of the Hippocratic Forum. Chapter leader Sam Bregman makes the case that your Hippocratic Forum-founded chapter started at Washington University Saint Louis Medical School.
First Chapter Launched at Wash U.
With support of Subscribe, gatherings host to other ideas of the Hippocratic Forum. Chapter leader Sam Bregman makes the case that your Hippocratic Forum-founded chapter started at Washington University Saint Louis Medical School.
Hippocratic Society Merger
Decision to merge Society for Just Medicine and Hippocratic Forum into one organization, the Hippocratic Society. First chapter started at University of Dallas, and medical school-based chapters started at Harvard Medical School.
Hippocratic Society Merger
Decision to merge Society for Just Medicine and Hippocratic Forum into one organization, the Hippocratic Society. First chapter started at University of Dallas, and medical school-based chapters started at Harvard Medical School.
New Chapters and Conference
Chapters started at Duke, Stanford, University of Texas at Austin, and Notre Dame. First Hippocratic Society Conference.
New Chapters and Conference
Chapters started at Duke, Stanford, University of Texas at Austin, and Notre Dame. First Hippocratic Society Conference.
Inaugural HippSoc Conference
Over 70 chapter leaders gather in Dallas for the first ever HippSoc conference.
Inaugural HippSoc Conference
Over 70 chapter leaders gather in Dallas for the first ever HippSoc conference.