A short history of medical ethics / Albert R. Jonsen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jonsen, Albert R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical ethics--History.

Medical ethics.

Bioethics--History.

Bioethics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (168 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University press, 2000.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A physician says, "I have an ethical obligation never to cause the death of a patient," another responds, "My ethical obligation is to relieve pain even if the patient dies." The current argument over the role of physicians in assisting patients to die constantly refers to the ethical duties of the profession. References to the Hippocratic Oath are often heard. Many modern problems, from assisted suicide to accessible health care, raise questions about the traditional ethics of medicine and the medical profession. However, few know what the traditional ethics are and how they came into being. This book provides a brief tour of the complex story of medical ethics evolved over centuries in both Western and Eastern cultures. It sets this story in the social and cultural contexts in which the work of healing was practiced and suggests that, behind the many different perceptions about the ethical duties of physicians, certain themes appear constantly, and may be relevant to modern debates. The book begins with the Hippocratic Medicine of ancient Greece, moves throught the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian and Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition. - Publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : the long tradition of ethics in medicine

Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman medicine : fifth century BCE to third century CE

Medieval medicine : fifth to fourteenth centuries CE

Medical ethics of India and China

Renaissance and Enlightenment : fourteenth to eighteenth centuries

British medicine : eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Ethics in American medicine

American medicine : science, competence, and ethics

A chronicle of ethical events : 1940s to 1980s

Conclusion : from medical ethics to bioethics.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199747870

1-280-83421-8

9786610834211

0-19-974787-3

OCLC:

607552700