Clash of Symbols—The AMA Stone in the Washington Monument: Hippocratectomy or Hippocratoplasty?

To the Editor.—  It is fitting for the American Medical Association (AMA) to launch a fund to create a symbol of American medicine to be displayed by the National Park Service. But its choice of the same inappropriate symbol it selected over 100 years ago is disappointing.¹The original symbol was a sculpture of Hippocrates refusing to give medical aid to an enemy of his homeland. The 19th-century American physician considered patriotic the attitude that the physician was the servant of the state before being the servant of humanity. (Perhaps this attitude contributed to the imprisonment of Dr Mudd because he gave medical aid to President Lincoln's assassin.) Today, however, I think most American physicians would consider the old attitude chauvinistic, unethical, uncharitable, and mean.The original sculpture by Beck, whom posterity has judged to have been without talent and imagination, was a translation into stone of a painting