Page 32 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

and life and also that of others, when our health is
significantly compromised, the good of medicine as
practised by experts stands in the service of human life
and health, in a curative, palliative or preventative form.

ii. The therapeutic principle and its aims
The therapeutic principle as the basis for each and every
intervention in medicine and surgery requires that every
such act aim at:
� the restoration of the health of a human person whose
bodily functions, including at the psychological level,
are impaired, or
� preventing such pathologies where they are foreseen
or where there is a foreseeable danger of them arising
or
� seeking to impede the deterioration of a person’s
health where a cure is not possible,
� as well as proper palliative care where other interven-
tions are not longer possible or are judged objectively
to be ineffective.

iii. Other dimensions of the therapeutic principle

The principle requires that those who intervene med-
ically upon any human subject, from conception to
natural death, be well-qualified, competent and at the
service of that patient’s true and authentic medical good,
neither doing them deliberate harm nor risking their
harm through neglect. This was enshrined expressly and
unequivocally in the classical version of the Hippocratic
Oath.⁴ It demands further the informed consent of the

⁴ Cf. the specific references to the third part of the Oath, and the
careful analysis of them which follows: T. Iglesias, The dignity
of the individual: issues in bioethics and law (Pleroma, Dublin, 2001),
pp. 25–30.

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