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This paper draws on eighteenth-century British medical ethics to elucidate compassion and empathy and explains how compassion and empathy can be taught, to rectify their frequent conflation. The professional virtue of compassion was first described in eighteenth-century British medical ethics by the Scottish physician-ethicist, John Gregory (1724–1773) who built on the moral psychology of David Hume (1711–1776) and its principle of sympathy. Compassion is the habitual exercise of the affective capacity to engage, with self-discipline, in the experience of the patient and therefore become driven to provide effective care for the patient. Empathy is the habitual exercise of the cognitive capacity to imagine the experience of patient and to have reasons to care for the patient. There are rare clinical circumstances in which empathy should replace compassion, for example, in responding to abusive patients. Because the abstract concepts of medical ethics are translated into clinical practice by medical educators, we identify the pedagogical implications of these results by setting out a process for teaching compassion and empathy. Eighteenth-century British medical ethics provides a clinically applicable, philosophical response to conflation of the moral virtue of compassion and the intellectual virtue of empathy and applying them clinically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historiographic survey of extant English translations and interpretations of the renowned Hippocratic first aphorism has demonstrated a concerning acceptance and application of ancient deontological principles that have been used to justify a practice of medicine that has been both paternalistic and heteronomous. Such principles reflect an enduring Hippocratism that has perpetuated an insufficient appreciation of the moral nature of the aphorism's second sentence in the practice of the art of medicine. That oversight has been constrained by a philological discourse that has centred on the meanings of the aphorism's first sentence, while little consideration has been given to the more important ethical consideration within the second sentence's imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional historiography tends to draw a negative picture of British doctors' ethics during the long nineteenth century. The medical professional ethics of this period have been described as self-serving and as a tool to monopolise the health care market. In this paper I attempt to challenge this rather one-sided view by looking into evidence for the practice of medical ethics, not just its normative texts. Focusing on the disciplinary function of the General Medical Council and discussing a variety of its cases, from fraudulent registration, sexual misconduct and breach of confidence to negligence, covering unqualified assistants and advertising, I argue that nineteenth-century medical ethics aimed at supporting the interests of patients and of the public at large as well as the reputation of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to compare "Zapiski Vracha" ("Confessions of a Physician", first published in 1901) by Vikenty Veresaev to "Aerztliche Ethik" ("Doctors' Ethics", first published in 1902; two Russian editions were published in 1903 and 1904) by Albert Moll. It starts with an overview of medical ethics in Russia at the turn of the 20th century in relation to zemstvo medicine, followed by reception of Veresaev's "Confessions of a Physician" by Russian and German physicians, and of Moll's "Doctors' Ethics" in Russia. Comparison of these two books may serve as a good example of a search for common philosophical foundations of medical ethics as well as the impact of national cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper discusses the relevance and significance of the Hippocratic Oath to contemporary medical ethical and moral values. It attempts to answer the questions about some controversial issues related to the Oath. The text is divided in two parts. Part I discusses the general attributes and ethical values of the Oath, while Part II presents a detailed analysis of each passage of the Oath with regard to perennial ethical principles and moral values. Part I starts with the contribution of Hippocrates and his School of Cos to medicine. It continues by examining the moral dilemmas concerning physicians and patients in the Classical Times and in the Modern World. It also investigates how the Hippocratic Oath stands nowadays, with regard to the remarkable and often revolutionary advancements in medical practice and the significant evolution in medical ethics. Further, it presents the debate and the criticism about the relevance of the general attributes and ethical values of the Oath to those of modern societies. Finally, it discusses the endurance of the ethical values of the Hippocratic Oath over the centuries until today with respect to the physicians' commitment to the practice of patient-oriented medicine. Part I concludes with the Oath's historic input in the Judgment delivered at the close of the Nuremberg "Doctors' Trial"; this Judgement has become legally binding for the discipline in the Western World and was the basis of the Nuremberg Code. The ethical code of the Oath turned out to be a fundamental part of western law not only on medical ethics but also on patients' rights regarding research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the historical foundations of ethics in human research are key to illuminating future human research and clinical trials. This paper gives an overview of the most remarkable unethical human research and how past misconducts helped develop ethical guidelines on human experimentation such as The Nuremberg Code 1947 following WWII. Unethical research in the field of neuroscience also proved to be incredibly distressing. Participants were often left with life-long cognitive disabilities. This emphasizes the importance of implicating strict rules and ethical guidelines in neuroscience research that protect participants and respects their dignity. The experiments conducted by German Nazi in the concentration camps during WWII are probably the most inhumane and brutal ever conducted. The Nuremberg Code of 1947, one of the few positive outcomes of the Nazi experiments, is often considered the first document to set out ethical regulations of human research. It consists of numerous necessary criteria, to highlight a few, the subject must give informed consent, there must be a concrete scientific basis for the experiment, and the experiment should yield positive results that cannot be obtained in any other way. In the end, we must remember, the interest of the patient must always prevail over the interest of science or society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, the distribution of corpses to anatomists was based on a reciprocal logic. In exchange for state-funded care, the poor subordinated their bodies to the advancement of science. Recent research has shown that this practice was increasingly contested in continental Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards. In this article, the Belgian debate on dissection without consent is scrutinised from multiple perspectives. I argue that political and legal debates on the treatment of the poor and the ownership of the dead led to changes in the distribution of corpses for dissection. As indigent patients obtained ownership of their bodies, anatomists increasingly had to comply with the standard of consent. By contextualising the emergence of anatomical donation, this article sheds light on a neglected topic in the social history of anatomy and on the changing significance of death customs, which began to express the will of the deceased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should the field of bioethics grapple with a history that includes ethicists who supported eugenics, scientific racism, and even Nazi medicine and also ethicists who created the salutary policy and practice responses to those heinous aspects of medical history? Learning humility from studying historical errors is one path to improvement; finding courage from studying historical strengths is another, but these can be in tension. This commentary lays out these paths and seeks to apply them both to a contemporary challenge facing the field: why hasn't bioethics been more at the forefront of efforts to address inequities in health and health care? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nazi medicine and its atrocities have been explored in depth over the past few decades, but scholars have started to examine medical ethics under Nazism only in recent years. Given the medical crimes and immoral conduct of physicians during the Third Reich, it is often assumed that Nazi medical authorities spurned ethics. However, in 1939, Germany introduced mandatory lectures on ethics as part of the medical curriculum. Course catalogs and archival sources show that lectures on ethics were an integral part of the medical curriculum in Germany between 1939 and 1945. Nazi officials established lecturer positions for the new subject area, named Medical Law and Professional Studies, at every medical school. The appointed lecturers were mostly early members of the Nazi Party and imparted Nazi political and moral values in their teaching. These values included the unequal worth of human beings, the moral imperative of preserving a pure Aryan people, the authoritarian role of the physician, the individual's obligation to stay healthy, and the priority of public health over individual-patient care. This article shows that there existed not only a Nazi version of medical ethics but also a systematic teaching of such ethics to students in Nazi Germany. The findings illustrate that, from a historical point of view, the notion of "eternal values" that are inherent to the medical profession is questionable. Rather, the prevailing medical ethos can be strongly determined by politics and the zeitgeist and therefore has to be repeatedly negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late nineteenth century onwards there emerged an increasingly diverse response to escalating patenting activity. Inventors were generally supportive of legislation that made patenting more accessible, while others, especially manufacturers, saw patenting culture as an impediment. The medical profession claimed that patenting represented ‘a barrier to medical treatment’ and was thus detrimental to the nation's health, yet, as I argue, the profession's development of strict codes of conduct forbidding practitioners from patenting resulted in rebellion from some members, who increasingly sought protection for their inventions. Such polarized opinions within the medical trade continue to affect current medical practice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from the May 26, 2015 third Ulmer Tagung conference of the Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin (GTE) medical history and ethics society of Universität Ulm university in Ulm, Germany on the role of war in German medical history. Topics of presentations delivered included the historical relationship between war and medicine, the use of prostheses in and following World War I, and suicide among Nazi soldiers.

Following a medical examination, in late March 1908, Rebecca Levi, a young in-patient in the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases, made a serious allegation against Jones. Having discussed the matter, behind closed doors, the hospital Committee called upon Jones to resign. Many years later Jones wrote up his account of the 1908 Affair, which his biographers and historians of psychoanalysis have accepted more or less without question. Such uncritical readings raise questions as to how the psychoanalytic community chooses to engage with the allegations of indecent (child) assault levelled against Jones. Reading the contemporaneous documents, including Ian Malcolm's letters to Jones, Dr Savill's account of Rebecca Levi together with various other texts, reveals serious discrepancies in Jones's narrative, thereby suggesting a far more disturbing scenario than Jones ever allowed. The paper concludes by examining the distinctions to be drawn around Jones's sexual relationships with his adult patients as opposed to his treatment of prepubescent girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case discussion offers important opportunities to do good medical ethics, but do we understand what the benefits might be? This paper looks at the 'Case Conference' series in the JME, its origins and methods, examines some cases in outline, and reviews issues that arise that are not usually taken into account. Cases are harder to publish now, not least because of ethical constraints. Ways past this apparently paradoxical outcome are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the, hitherto comparatively unexplored, reception of Greek embryology by medieval Muslim jurists. The article elaborates on the views attributed to Hippocrates (d. ca. 375 BC), which received attention from both Muslim physicians, such as Avicenna (d. 1037), and their Jewish peers living in the Muslim world including Ibn Jumayʽ (d. ca. 1198) and Moses Maimonides (d. 1204). The religio-ethical implications of these Graeco- Islamic- Jewish embryological views were fathomed out by the two medieval Muslim jurists Shihāb al- Dīn al- Qarāfī (d. 1285) and Ibn al- Qayyim (d. 1350). By putting these medieval religio-ethical discussions into the limelight, the article aims to argue for a two-pronged thesis. Firstly, pre-modern medical ethics did exist in the Islamic tradition and available evidence shows that this field had a multidisciplinary character where the Islamic scriptures and the Graeco- Islamic- Jewish medical legacy were highly intertwined. This information problematizes the postulate claiming that medieval Muslim jurists were hostile to the so-called 'ancient sciences'. Secondly, these medieval religio-ethical discussions remain playing a significant role in shaping the nascent field of contemporary Islamic bioethics. However, examining the exact character and scope of this role still requires further academic ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors focus on the history and evolution of medical ethics and discuss its relation with the London Medical Group (LMG) in England and the Institute of Medical Ethics. They inform that students at the LMG used to select topics related to medical ethics and there were four lectures on medical ethics during 1963–1964 academic year. They state that an Edinburgh Medical Group has been established in Newcastle, England in 1967 and mention the report "The Pond Report."

This article discusses the medical ethics espoused by 2nd century Greek physician Galen. The author comments on the influence of Galen's works and philosophies on modern medical doctrine and ethics. She also describes the emphasis Galen placed on medical knowledge on quality of life. His study of human emotions, passions, and psychology and their influence on physical health is examined. The relationship between philosophy and medicine as understood by Galen is analyzed and his ideas regarding the impact of one's environment on one's health is also explored.

In this article the author discusses the relationship between bioethics, psychoanalysis and medicine. She is critical of what bioethics has become in 2013 and of the objectives behind much bioethics research which is conducted in 2013. She is supportive of liberating bioethics from the medico-industrial complex and from bioscience and technology, both intellectually and financially, and of helping bioethics become more global in its scope.

This article explores the ways in which risk and responsibility were conceptualised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by surgeons, their patients and the lay public. By this point surgery could be seen, simultaneously, as safe (due to developments in surgical science) and increasingly risky (because such progress allowed for greater experimentation). With the glorification of the heroic surgeon in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period came a corresponding, if grudging, recognition that successful surgery was supported by a team of ancillary professionals. In theory, therefore, blame for mistakes could be shared amongst the team; in practice, this was not always the case. Opening with an examination of the May Thorne negligence case of 1904, I will also, in the latter third of this piece, focus on surgical risks encountered by women surgeons, themselves still relatively new and, therefore, potentially risky individuals. A brief case study of the ways in which one female-run institution, the New Hospital forWomen, dealt with debates surrounding risk and responsibility concludes this article. The origin of the risks perceived and the ways in which responsibility was taken (or not) for risky procedures will provide ways of conceptualising what 'surgical anxiety' meant in the 1890s and 1900s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ANPRM), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed substantial changes to how biospecimen research is treated under the regulations governing human subjects research. Currently, much of this research can be conducted without consent because it may not be considered 'human subjects' research, is considered exempt, or consent may be waived. Responding to criticisms that scientific changes have made biospecimen research riskier than contemplated when the Common Rule was last amended, the ANPRM proposes to require written consent for biospecimen research, even if they have been stripped of identifiers or initially collected for a non-research purpose. The ANPRM's recognition of these risks is consistent with relatively recent NIH recommendations that research projects involving genetics, genomics, or biospecimen repositories should consider getting a Certificate of Confidentiality to provide additional protections to participants where breach of confidentiality is typically the primary risk. Ironically, the ANPRM proposals may make it more difficult to provide these protections. Our paper explores the implications of the conflicting requirements of the Certificate and the ANPRM proposals and makes recommendations for achieving the dual goals of appropriate consent and adequate confidentiality protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article details the relationship between history and bioethics. I argue that historians' reluctance to engage with bioethics rests on a misreading of the field as solely reducible to applied ethics, and overlooks previous enthusiasm for historical perspectives. I claim that seeing bioethics as its practitioners see it - as an interdisciplinary meeting ground - should encourage historians to collaborate in greater numbers. I conclude by outlining how bioethics might benefit from new histories of the field, and how historians can lend a fresh perspective to bioethical debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have castigated the British medical profession for endorsing forcible feeding during the suffragette hunger strike campaigns of 1909 to 1914. This article reconsiders the importance of medical opposition to forcible feeding by closely analysing its agendas and, importantly, by positing that the medico-ethical debates sparked in that period set the stage for ethical discourses that have recurrently resurfaced ever since. Although leading contemporary medical institutions and figures did indeed turn a blind eye to forcible feeding, the nature of medical opposition where it did arise, and the complex medico-ethical dilemmas posed by the procedure, demand fuller investigation, not least because they illuminate concerns still raised today. More specifically, I explore historical disagreement on forcible feeding as a therapeutic or coercive technique, the complex positioning of the prison doctor who performed the procedure and contestation over the extent to which the state ought to intervene in prison medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Before World War II German physicians and scientists were responsible for major advances in medicine. The actions of doctors in the Nazi system were an aberration of this legacy; however, not all Nazi doctors operated in an ethical vacuum. This paper examines the doctors' trial at Nuremberg in 1946. This paper draws attention to the utilitarian medical ethics of the Nazi doctor Karl Brandt and discusses how utilitarianism still informs medical practice today. The Hippocratic Oath was cited by the prosecution at the Nuremberg doctors' trial as part of the common law of medicine. Brandt and his defense lawyer Dr. Robert Servatius countered by arguing that Brandt was acting in the best interests of the state. He and Servatius argued that the morality of German doctors in the Nazi system represented an alternate medical ethics to that practiced in western democracies. In the end Brandt was found guilty of negligence due to the presence of non-German citizens in the T-4 "euthanasia" program of which Brandt had been in charge. "Brandt's trial highlights utilitarianism in medical ethics whereby physicians are responsible for determining the cost that treatment of the individual represents to the community. The community sets limits and physicians must work within those limits, but in order to act as a bulwark to malevolent state power as existed in Nazi Germany, physicians have a duty to advocate for life and treatment whenever possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines for the first time the theologically based medical ethics of the late sixteenth-century English Calvinist minister William Perkins. Although Perkins did not write a single focused book on the subject of medical ethics, he addressed a variety of moral issues in medicine in his numerous treatises on how laypeople should conduct themselves in their vocations and in all aspects of their daily lives. Perkins wrote on familiar issues such as the qualities of a good physician, the conduct of sick persons, the role of the minister in healing, and obligations in time of pestilence. His most significant contribution was his distinction between “lawful” and “unlawful” medicine, the latter category including both medical astrology and magic. Perkins's works reached a far greater audience in England and especially New England than did the treatises of contemporary secular medical ethics authors and his writings were influential in guiding the moral thinking of many pious medical practitioners and laypersons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the history of bioethics and presents predictions for the future of the profession. Topics include the origins of bioethics in civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of bioethicists on the concepts of autonomy and protection of human subjects, and the ethical challenges posed by technological innovations such as genome sequencing, microbiomics, and tissue engineering.

The article discusses the medical history of Early Christianity, with a focus on the establishment of Christian based medical care and aid for the sick. Topics discussed include the theological basis of Christian medical care, locations established for providing care and aid to particular demographics, such as the sick, the elderly, and children without guardians; and the management and structures of Christian medical and aid institutions, such as hospitals, orphanages, and homes for the elderly.

The article discusses the history of medicine and medical ethics in the period of Late Antiquity, with a focus on medical deontology and medical texts during this period. Topics discussed include background on medicine and medical ethics in Late Antiquity, and the interaction between Christianity and Hellenism; the work and theory of physician and medical researcher of the period Galen and the influence of Hippocrates, and medical works and manuals of the time concerning the philosophy of deontology and medical ethics.

Using the lens of Romantic-era medical ethics, this essay seeks to reconsider Wordsworth's much-debated “healing power.” I argue that Wordsworth, who initially sought to model his own medical poetics on nature's holistic vitality, found that “healing” in its absolute sense could not be achieved through art alone. Like Romantic doctors, who saw the imperfection of their medical knowledge mirrored in frequent therapeutic failure, the poet turned to alleviation as an alternative model for effective therapy. In so doing, Wordsworth and his medical contemporaries illustrated a possible ethical ramification of Romantic organicism and its related fragmentary aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The physician and sexologist Albert Moll, from Berlin, was one of the main protagonists within the German discourse on the opportunities and dangers of social engineering, by eugenic interventions into human life in general, as well as into reproductive hygiene and healthcare policy in particular. One of the main sexological topics that were discussed intensively during the late-Wilhelminian German Reich and the Weimar Republic was the question of the legalisation of voluntary and compulsory sterilisations on the basis of medical, social, eugenic, economic or criminological indications. As is clear from Moll's conservative principles of medical ethics, and his conviction that the genetic knowledge required for eugenically indicated sterilisations was not yet sufficiently elaborated, he had doubts and worries about colleagues who were exceedingly zealous about these surgical sterilisations -- especially Gustav Boeters from Saxony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writings of Henry Beecher (1904-1976) have had an enormous influence on thinking and practice with respect to the ethics of medicine and clinical research. This essay examines the seminal contributions of Beecher as illustrated by four landmark articles concerning the ethics of clinical research, the placebo effect and placebo-controlled trials, the evaluation of invasive procedures, and "brain death" and vital organ transplantation. To appreciate Beecher's legacy, it is salutary to explicate the significance of his enduring contributions and to critically evaluate their limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinction between clinical research and clinical practice directs how we partition medicine and biomedical science. Reasons for a sharp distinction date historically to the work of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, especially to its analysis of the 'boundaries' between research and practice in the Belmont Report (1978) . Belmont presents a segregation model of the research-practice distinction, according to which research and practice form conceptually exclusive sets of activities and interventions. This model is still the standard in federal regulations today. However, the Commission's deliberations and conclusions about the boundaries are more complicated, nuanced, and instructive than has generally been appreciated. The National Commission did not conclude that practice needs no oversight comparable to the regulation of research. It debated the matter and inclined to the view that the oversight of practice needed to be upgraded, though the Commission stopped short of proposing new regulations for its oversight, largely for prudential political reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the opening years of Thomas Wakley's 1823 journal the Lancet, which rose to dominate the precarious early-nineteenth-century medical publishing market. The author argues that Wakley was an editor acutely aware of his journal's relationship to a wider nonmedical press and that this awareness may have even contributed to the Lancet's early success. In addition to, and often contiguous with, the journal's strongly worded critique and detailed medical content, Wakley sought to attract readers by importing entertaining formal components from lay periodicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious voices were important in the early days of the contemporary field of bioethics but have now become decidedly less prominent. This is unfortunate because religious elements are essential parts of the most foundational aspects of bioethics. The problem is that there is an incommensurability between religious language and languages of public discourse such as the 'public reason' of John Rawls. To eliminate what is unique in religious language is to lose something essential. This paper examines the reasons for the marginalization of religion in bioethics, shows the limitations of Rawls's notion of public reason, and argues for a more robust role for theology in articulating a new language for public discourse in bioethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioethics has a founding story in which medical paternalism, the interference with the autonomy of patients for their own clinical benefit, was an accepted ethical norm in the history of Western medical ethics and was widespread in clinical practice until bioethics changed the ethical norms and practice of medicine. In this paper I show that the founding story of bioethics misreads major texts in the history of Western medical ethics. I also show that a major source for empirical claims about the widespread practice of medical paternalism has been misread. I then show that that bioethics based on its founding story deprofessionalizes medical ethics. The result leaves the sick exposed to the predatory power of medical practitioners and healthcare organizations with only their autonomy-based rights to non-interference, expressed in contracts, to protect them. The sick are stripped of the protection afforded by a professional, fiduciary relationship of physicians to their patients. Bioethics based on its founding story reverts to the older model of a contractual relationship between the sick and medical practitioners not worthy of intellectual or moral trust (because such trust cannot be generated by what I call 'deprofessionalizing bioethics'). On closer examination, bioethics based on its founding story, ironically, eliminates paternalism as a moral category in bioethics, thus causing bioethics to collapse on itself because it denies one of the necessary conditions for medical paternalism. Bioethics based on its founding story should be abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I reflect on the past, present, and future of the field of bioethics. In so doing, I offer a very situated overview of where bioethics has been, where it now is, where it seems to be going, where I think we could do better, and where I dearly hope the field will be heading. I also propose three ways of re-orienting our theoretic tools to guide us in a new direction: (1) adopt an ethics of responsibility; (2) explore the responsibilities of various kinds of actors and relationships among them; (3) expand the types of participants engaged in bioethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the disciplines of literature and history and the contributions each makes to the discourse of bioethics. In each case I note the pedagogic ends that can be enacted though the appropriate use of the each of these disciplines in the sphere of medical education, particularly in the medical ethics classroom. I then explore the contribution that both these disciplines and their respective methodologies can and do bring to the academic field of bioethics. I conclude with a brief consideration of the relations between literature and history with particular attention to the possibilities for a future bioethics informed by history and literature after the empirical turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, medical doctors faced heavy competition. They competed for patients and for institutional positions and sought a variety of means to enhance their reputations. Among rank-and-file physicians, some strove to respond to the high expectations and rationalistic discourse fueled by Enlightenment philosophy. They aimed to build a new medicine on rational and empirical principals. Concentrating on the rich correspondence left by young physicians born in Geneva, this article maps out the social and moral dilemmas encountered by ambitious young physicians in the second half of the eighteenth century, who, like many thousands of others, flocked to Edinburgh, "the first medical school" in Europe. Conscious that they formed but one group among a series of possible practitioners, they pondered over cultural codes, civilities and economic realities as they strove to promote the figure of a knowledgeable, experienced, gentlemanlike physician. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We understand metahistory as an approach that studies how histories within a particular discipline have been written and focus on insider scientists' reconstructions of twin research. Using the concept of ethicalpolitical affordances we suggest that such histories are based on a management of resources that prove to be beneficial for representing one's own research traditions in a positive light. Instead of discussing information on the context and intellectual life of pioneers of the twin method, which include high-caliber eugenicists and Nazi ideologues, and on how the twin method has been used and abused, insider scientists' accounts present twin research as neutral, objective and void of any kind of political connotations. We show how important leaders of German twin research have been historically managed, and how their contributions have been distorted and omitted. Reasons for historical revisionism by omission and for selectively revised accounts of the past are discussed. Suggestions for writing accounts of the twin method are included and focus on the necessity of self-reflection, considerations regarding one's own ethical-political inclinations, and review of the existing historical literature. In analyzing these connections, we attempt to understand how science, politics and history interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early-nineteenth-century America, anatomical narrative was crucial to the acquisition and performance of medical identity. Dissecting the dead, robbing graves, making and exhibiting "anatomical preparations," and joking with bodies and body parts all served to affirm membership in the cult of medical knowledge. So did telling stories about such things. Through an examination of the autobiography of Charles Knowlton (1800-1850), a rural physician who practiced in northwestern Massachusetts, this article argues that the recitation and exchange of anatomical stories enabled medical practitioners to assert professional identity, healing competence, and filiations with theories and cliques. In both content and performance, the anatomical tale rehearsed the storyteller's structural relationship to patients, the public, colleagues and rivals, and, above all, made a claim to knowledge and mastery of the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role the British Ministry of Health played in the early development of Research Ethics Committees (RECs) to oversee clinical research within the National Health Service (NIH) during the 1960s in Great Britain. Particular attention is paid to the interests and forces that shaped the expansion of these critical organizations. It is argued that the Ministry of Health did not wish to formally set the rules for RECs, but maintained a measure of authority through indirect means that influenced ethics review policy. Details and reactions to a key report issued in July 1967 by the Royal College of Physician's Committee on the Ethical Supervision of Clinical Investigations in Institutions are discussed.

The article focuses on eugenic sterilization in Romania in the 20th century. Particular attention is given to the sterilization of the Roma in the Czech Republic and China's policies towards family planning. Information for why eugenic sterilization was accepted and the differing areas of the world where it was endorsed is provided.

The paper provides a critical commentary on the article by Baker and McCullough on Medical Ethic's Appropriation of Moral Philosophy. The author argues that Baker and McCullough offer a more "pragmatic" approach to the history of medical ethics that has the potential to enrich the bioethics field with a greater historical grounding and sound methodology. Their approach can help us to come to a more nuanced understanding about the way in which medical ethics has connected, disconnected, and reconnected with philosophical ideas throughout the centuries. The author points out that Baker and McCullough's model can run the danger of overemphasizing the role of medical ethicists whilst marginalizing the influence of philosophers and of other historical actors and forces. He critically reviews the two case studies on which Baker and McCullough focus and concludes that scholars need to bear in mind the levels of uncertainty and ambivalence that accompany the process of transformation and dissemination of moral values in medicine and medical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first ‘modern’ presentation of medical ethics is generally acknowledged to be Percival's text of 1803. The main theme of this influential pamphlet was the way in which medical practitioners should relate to one another. Two centuries later, clinical practice has very different moral underpinnings: bioethics, which first emerged in the middle of the 20th century, is not concerned with how doctors should interact with each other but with the responsibilities of medical practitioners to their patients. The shift from an ethics based on the relationship between practitioners to one based on the relationship with their patients is viewed as a major advance brought about by a more enlightened society engaging with the consequences of new technologies. But rather than addressing the changing picture of medical ethics in its own terms (which over the last few decades has been from the perspective of bioethics) I examine the history of medical ethics in its close relationship to the form and nature of the medical profession. Further, in a parallel thread I describe contemporary developments in public health and explore the similarities and connections between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confidentiality, as the right to secrecy is nowadays called, applies to information to which health personnel have access while performing their duties. In other words, it is a right of patients to exert control over health information regarding them and keep such information inaccessible to others. Privacy and confidentiality are overlapping concepts. The difference is that the rules covering confidentiality generally place limits on disclosure. Privacy has a broader scope, but - above all - confidentiality is a corollary to the right of privacy.

Looks back on the children's euthanasia program developed and instituted by Nazi biologists during Germany's Third Reich. Rise of the eugenics movement in Europe; Formation of an advisory committee to prepare for the killing of deformed and retarded children; Requirement of the immediate reporting of the delivery of infants with congenital deformities and mental retardation; Subjection of the children to euthanasia.

Clinical ethics, like bioethics more generally, until recently has tended to focus on the present and future, with little attention to the history of moral thought about health care that preceded bioethics. As a consequence, clinical ethics and bioethics lack maturity as fields of the humanities. The papers in this year's clinical ethics issue of the Journal put contemporary clinical ethics in critical dialogue with the past, making the former accountable to the latter. The six papers in this issue of the Journal are briefly described, with an emphasis on how they contribute to the maturation of clinical ethics as a field of the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research on the texts of the Byzantine historians and chroniclers revealed an apparently curious phenomenon, namely, the abandonment of terminally ill emperors by their physicians when the latter realised that they could not offer any further treatment. This attitude tallies with the mentality of the ancient Greek physicians, who even in Hippocratic times thought the treatment and care of the terminally ill to be a challenge to nature and hubris to the gods. Nevertheless, it is a very curious attitude in the light of the concepts of the Christian Byzantine physicians who, according to the doctrines of the Christian religion, should have been imbued with the spirit of philanthropy and love for their fellowmen. The meticulous analysis of three examples of abandonment of Byzantine emperors, and especially that of Alexius I Comnenus, by their physicians reveals that this custom, following ancient pagan ethics, in those times took on a ritualised form without any significant or real content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eugenics casts a long shadow over contemporary genetics. Any measure, whether in clinical genetics or biotechnology, which is suspected of eugenic intent is likely to be opposed on that ground. Yet there is little consensus on what this word signifies, and often only a remote connection to the very complex set of social movements which took that name. After a brief historical summary of eugenics, this essay attempts to locate any wrongs inherent in eugenic doctrines. Four candidates are examined and rejected. The moral challenge posed by eugenics for genetics in our own time, I argue, is to achieve social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of medicine as a profession in the English-language literature of medical ethics is of recent vintage, invented by the Scottish physician and medical ethicist, John Gregory (1724-1773). Gregory wrote the first secular, philosophical, clinical, and feminine medical ethics and bioethics in the English language and did so on the basis of Hume's principle of sympathy. This paper provides a brief account of Gregory's invention and the role that Humean sympathy plays in that invention, with reference to key texts in Gregory's work. The paper also considers two interesting and perhaps provocative ways in which Hume can be read through Gregory: first, sympathy as a principle of scientific discovery in Hume's science of man and moral physiology; and sympathy as gendered feminine in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume's principle of sympathy is at the core of Gregory's medical ethics and the histories of Western medical ethics and bioethics pivot on Gregory--and, therefore, on Hume--as it does on few other figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]