[Medical discretion in the past and today]

It is based on old traditions that a physician and other medical personal have to be diskrete about their conversation with patients as well as about diagnostic and therapeutical measures. The roots are found in the early times when priests were working as medical therapists. Well known are the Asclepiads in old Greece and later on in the Roman Empire. They were priests in the tempels of the god Asclepios and the famous Hippocrates of Cos was also an Asclepiad and nevertheless the founder of western scientific medicine. The historian of medicine can demonstrate a steady development of the professional discretion observed by physicians and surgeons on different political, cultural and scientific conditions until today.