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Modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world is commonly thought to derive from the medical philosophy of the Scotsman John Gregory (1725-1773) and his younger associates, the English Dissenter Thomas Percival (1740-1804) and the American Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). This book is the first extensive study of this suggestion. Dr Haakonssen shows how the three thinkers combined Francis Bacon's and the Scottish Enlightenment's ideas of the science of morals and the morals of science. She demonstrates how their medical ethics was a successful adaptation of traditional moral ideas to the dramatically changing medical world especially the voluntary hospital. In accounting for the dynamics of this process, she rejects the anachronism that modern medical ethics was a new paradigm.

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.

Like many novel ideas, the idea for this volume and its predecessor arose over lunch in the cafeteria of the old Wellcome Institute. On an atternoon in Sept- ber 1988, Dorothy and Roy Porter, and I, sketched out a plan for a set of conf- ences in which scholars from a variety of disciplines would explore the emergence of modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world: from its pre-history in the quarrels that arose as gentlemanly codes of etiquette and honor broke down under the pressure of the eighteenth-century "sick trade," to the Enlightenment ethics of John Gregory and Thomas Percival, to the American appropriation process that culminated in the American Medical Association's 1847 Code of Ethics, and to the British turn to medical jurisprudence in the 1858 Medical Act. Roy Porter formally presented our idea as a plan for two back-to-back c- ferences to the Wellcome Trust, and I presented it to the editors of the PHI- LOSOPHY AND MEDICINE series, H. Tristram Engeihardt, Jr. and Stuart Spicker. The reception from both parties was enthusiastic and so, with the financial backing of the former and a commitment to publication from the latter, Roy Porter, ably assisted by Frieda Hauser and Steven Emberton, - ganized two conferences. The first was held at the Wellcome Institute in - cember 1989; the second was sponsored by the Wellcome, but was actually held in the National Hospital, in December 1990.

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

The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics.

This volume brings together original research that throws new light on how standards of behavior for medical practitioners are articulated in different religious, social, and political contexts.

This book provides the first comprehensive, historically based, philosophical interpretations of two texts of Thomas Percival’s professional ethics in medicine set in the context of his intellectual biography. Preceded by his privately published and circulated Medical Jurisprudence of 1794, Thomas Percival (1740-1804) published Medical Ethics in 1803, the first book thus titled in the global histories of medicine and medical ethics. From his days as a student at the Warrington Academy and the medical schools of the universities of Edinburgh and Leyden, Percival steeped himself in the scientific method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). McCullough shows how Percival became a Baconian moral scientist committed to Baconian deism and Dissent. Percival also drew on and significantly expanded the work of his predecessor in professional ethics in medicine, John Gregory (1724-1773). The result is that Percival should be credited with co-inventing professionalism in medicine with Gregory. To aid and encourage future scholarship, this book brings together the first time three essential Percival texts, Medical Jurisprudence, Medical Ethics, and Extracts from the Medical Ethics of Dr. Percival of 1823, the bridge from Medical Ethics to the 1847 Code of Medical Ethics on the American Medical Association. To support comparative reading, this book provides concordances of Medical Jurisprudence to Medical Ethics and of Medical Ethics to Extracts. Finally, this book includes the first Chronology of Percival’s life and works.