IF HIPPOCRATES, the "Father of Western Medicine" were alive today, would he favor Question 2, the Massachusetts ballot initiative to authorize doctor-prescribed suicide?Presumably not: The celebrated code of medical ethics that bears his name, which physicians for centuries took an oath to uphold, flatly forbids assisted suicide. "I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked," the Hippocratic Oath avows, "nor will I advise such a plan."Some things never change, and one of them is the beguiling idea that doctors should be able to help patients kill themselves when incurable disease makes their lives unbearable.