In the course of a day's work Christian Science practitioners are likely to hear many personal details of their patients' lives. Some of the stories related may seem stranger than fiction. Tangled problems connected with marriage and family, the intrigues of business affairs, personal hopes, fears, uncertainties, remorse, difficulties connected with church, home, office, and neighborhood relationships—even confessions of guilt in the matter of broken law. And the practitioners are bound to keep all the information strictly to themselves, not divulging a single detail to anyone else.
Mrs. Eddy has established confidentiality as a rule of her Church by including a By-Law in the Manual of The Mother Church under the heading "Practitioners and Patients." The first paragraph reads: "Members of this Church shall hold in sacred confidence all private communications made to them by their patients; also such information as may come to them by reason of their relation of practitioner to patient. A failure to do this shall subject the offender to Church discipline." Man., Art. VIII, Sect. 22;
This rule may be seen as parallel to the classical Hippocratic oath, which is still taken by graduates of many contemporary medical schools. Part of this oath reads, "Whatsoever things I see or hear concerning the life of men, in my attendance on the sick or even apart therefrom, which ought not to be noised abroad, I will keep silence thereon, counting such things to be as sacred secrets." The ethical approach of all Christian Science practitioners calls for the greatest care in observing the confidentiality of what they are told by their patients while they are treating them, and also afterward when the healing has taken place. It can be detrimental for a practitioner even to hint at involvement in a case after it is successfully concluded.
