​The goal of this open access book is to develop an approach to clinical health care ethics that is more accessible to, and usable by, health professionals than the now-dominant approaches that focus, for example, on the application of ethical principles. The book elaborates the view that health professionals have the emotional and intellectual resources to discuss and address ethical issues in clinical health care without needing to rely on the expertise of bioethicists. The early chapters review the history of bioethics and explain how academics from outside health care came to dominate the field of health care ethics, both in professional schools and in clinical health care. The middle chapters elaborate a series of concepts, drawn from philosophy and the social sciences, that set the stage for developing a framework that builds upon the individual moral experience of health professionals, that explains the discontinuities between the demands of bioethics and the experience and perceptions of health professionals, and that enables the articulation of a full theory of clinical ethics with clinicians themselves as the foundation. Against that background, the first of three chapters on professional education presents a general framework for teaching clinical ethics; the second discusses how to integrate ethics into formal health care curricula; and the third addresses the opportunities for teaching available in clinical settings. The final chapter, "Empowering Clinicians", brings together the various dimensions of the argument and anticipates potential questions about the framework developed in earlier chapters.

The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics provides the first global history of medical ethics.

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 culture. 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 through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian 7nd Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition.

Legal/Ethics

Evans closely examines the history of the bioethics profession.

The Origins of Bioethics argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. The Origins of Bioethics charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting.

The first history of American medical ethics published in more than a half century, Before Bioethics tracks the evolution of American medical ethics from colonial midwives and physicians' oaths to current bioethical controversies over abortion, AIDS, animal rights, and physician-assisted suicide.

The History and Bioethics of Medical Education: "You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught" continues the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by exploring approaches to the teaching of bioethics from disparate disciplines, geographies, and contexts. Van Rensselaer Potter coined the phrase "Global Bioethics" to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter’s founding vision from historical perspectives and asks, how did we get here from then? The patient-practitioner relationship has come to the fore in bioethics; this volume asks: is there an ideal bioethical curriculum? Are the students being carefully taught and, in turn, are they carefully learning? This volume will appeal to those working in both clinical medicine and the medical humanities, as vibrant connections are drawn between various ways of knowing.

This book is the first broad history of the growing field of bioethics. Covering the period 1947-1987, it examines the origin and evolution of the debates over human experimentation, genetic engineering, organ transplantation, termination of life-sustaining treatment, and new reproductive technologies. It assesses the contributions of philosophy, theology, law and the social sciences to the expanding discourse of bioethics. Written by one of the field's founders, it is based on extensive archival research into resources that are difficult to obtain and on interviews with many leading figures. A very readable account of the development of bioethics, the book stresses the history of ideas but does not neglect the social and cultural context and the people involved.

This open access book addresses a variety of issues relating to bioethics, in order to initiate cross-cultural dialogue. Beginning with the history, it introduces various views on bioethics, based on specific experiences from Japan. It describes how Japan has been confronted with Western bioethics and the ethical issues new to this modern age, and how it has found its foothold as it decides where it stands on these issues. In the last chapter, the author proposes discarding the overarching term ‘Global Bioethics’ in favor of the new term, ‘Bioethics Across the Globe (BAG)’, which carries a more universal connotation. This book serves as an excellent tool to help readers understand a different culture and to initiate deep and genuine global dialogue that incorporates local and global thinking on bioethics. Bioethics Across the Globe is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of bioethics/medical ethics interested in adopting cross-cultural approaches, as well as graduate and undergraduate students of healthcare and philosophy.