White coats, Hippocratic oaths, medicine as a calling - are these beneficial practices or harmful rituals? White Coat Ways traces seven medical traditions from their historical origins to their contemporary issues. Tracing these origins through common misconceptions - who really wrote the Hippocratic oath, are hospitals nonprofit - empowers the reader to approach contemporary controversies accurately. The stories along the way provide an intertwining history of foundational figures like Hippocrates, Joseph Lister, and Renee Laennec to downright bizarre stories of extraordinary mathematicians and goat testicle implantation.