prologue
"I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and do no harm to anyone. To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause his death. Nor will I give a woman a pessary to procure abortion. But I will preserve the purity of my life and my art. I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest...
All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or outside of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal. If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot."
--selected from the Hippocratic Oath
Do no harm.
Three words were beginning to haunt Ellis Maseke, the young medical student who would not have a doctorate for some months and whose surname would not be changed for nearly another two years; three small words, near-meaningless when they stood alone, but heavy with potency in their proper context. They began to whisper through his sleep, to appear inside his eyelids whenever they happened to close. In time those words would come to follow at his heels, rattling in the darkness behind him, growing louder when he tried to flee. They were to become his tormentors; his judges.
Do no harm.
The Hypocritical Oath, they'd called it jestingly in the medical school from which Ellis had already almost graduated even at his startlingly early age, those snide, magnanimous youths who by and large spent their nights dreaming of immense and extortionary doctors' bills; the Hypocritical Oath, that quaint old philosophy, with all its silly outdated religious ideals and impractical moral demands. Slowly that old unfunny joke had begun of late to lose any vestige of humor it might have had for Ellis, and would continue to do so until he winced to think of it.
The haunting began only as a vague sense of trepidation, a subtly disturbing idea that tugged occasionally at the corners of his consciousness like an anxious cat. It would take more time for it to form into words. More time to hear those words, which he had already heard himself--somewhat prematurely--speak with the most utter and naive conviction, hear them repeated again and again.
Do no harm. Do no harm.
Ellis was afraid it was already too late.