Laurence B. McCullough

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.

With Three Key Percival Texts, Two Concordances, and a Chronology

Thomas Percival’s Medical Ethics and the Invention of Medical Professionalism

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.

John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine

This volume introduces a new subseries of Philosophy and Medicine, Classics of Medical Ethics. The purpose of this new subseries is to bring out scholars' editions of major works in the history of medical ethics and philosophy of medicine. This new subseries will target for publication texts that are long out of print and difficult to access. Each volume will contain an introduction to the writings on medical ethics and philosophy of medicine produced by the original author. Each volume will also contain a guide to the primary and major secondary Hterature, to facilitate teaching and scholarship in bioethics, philosophy of medicine, and history of medicine. Texts will be presented in their origi nal style and will provide pagination of the original, so that citations can be made either to the original text or to the page numbers in these vol umes. Finally, each volume will be well indexed, again to facilitate teaching and research. Bioethics and philosophy of medicine - the former more so than the latter - have an insufficiently developed understanding of themselves as having a history. As a consequence, these fields lack the maturity that critical dialogue of the past with the present provides for other fields and disciplines of the humanities. To the extent that this problem is due to the fact that major primary historical sources are not readily available, this subseries will contribute to the further development and maturation of bioethics and philosophy of medicine as fields of the humanities.

John Gregory's Writings on Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine

Frank A. Chervenak

This book offers a comprehensive and clinically practical approach to ethics in the everyday practice of obstetrics and gynecology. The topics the authors address include: contraception, abortion, selective termination of multifetal pregnancies, gynecologic cancer, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, prenatal diagnosis, fetal therapy, cephalocentisis, prematurity, HIV infection, and court ordered cesarean delivery. The issues involved in making decisions in many of these areas are a source of conflict, and lead to crisis between the physician and patient. One of the book's strengths is its emphasis on prevention and, if prevention fails, management, of the conflicts and crises which arise in these areas of medicine. The authors develop their preventative and management strategies on the basis of a framework for bioethics in the clinical setting. This framework is rigorously established and defended. The authors argue that four virtues -- self effacement, self sacrifice, compassion, and integrity -- generate the physician's obligation to protect and promote the patient's interest. They then identify the three types of patient's interests -- social role interests, subjective interests, and deliberative interests -- and they reinterpret the ethical principles of beneficence and respect for autonomy in terms of these. The concept of the fetus as patient, the physician's obligation to third parties, and the moral standing of fathers and family members are also addressed. The implications of their argument sets the stage for the discussions of prevention and management in the remaining sections of the book. Ethics in Obstetrics and Gynecology is a unique addition to the literature in both biomedical ethics and obstetrics and gynecology. It demonstrates that ethics should be regarded as an essential part of obstetrics and gynecology, and that clinical practice is incomplete without it.

Ethics in Obstetrics and Gynecology

Robert B. Baker

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

Laurence B. McCullough

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