Making Modern Medical Ethics

The little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics, Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Robert Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and healthcare professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics. Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects’ informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient’s Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified.

​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 little-known stories of the people responsible for what we know today as modern medical ethics. In Making Modern Medical Ethics, Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Robert Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and healthcare professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics. Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects’ informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient’s Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified.

Ethics and Law in Modern Medicine is a unique book that explores the field of medical ethics and health care decision-making through hypothetical case studies. The truly unique feature of this volume is that each chapter sets forth a hypothetical fact pattern which includes role assignments to encourage participants to actively take part in group discussions and debate the controversial and cutting-edge topics that are presented. Each chapter includes in-depth discussion questions which thoroughly explore issues raised by the hypothetical fact patterns, and suggested readings provide background for participants. Additionally, the volume contains excerpts from key statutes and case law which govern the decision-making process presented in each chapter. The volume covers a wide variety of issues including HIV, the health care rights of minors, consent and confidentiality, assisted reproductive technology, property rights in bodily organs, research ethics, religious freedom and the right to refuse care, rationing of scarce resources, surrogate decision-making, and several other traditional as well as unique ethical, legal, and social issues.

This title was first published in 2001: Ethical thinking about medical decision-making has roots deep in history. This collection of contemporary essays by leading international scholars traces the development of modern bioethics and explores the theory and current issues surrounding this widely contested field.

A series of essays, written by a practicing physician, on a wide variety of topics in medical ethics, including: clinical uncertainty; moral pluralism; paternalism; AIDS; organ procurement; physicians' involvement in executions; abortion; age as a factor in medical decision-making; sustaining life in a permanently acognitive patient; dementia; disagreement among patient, family, and physician; withholding nutritional support for the hopelessly ill; and the matter of who decides to write a DNR (do not resuscitate) order.

"Because the discipline of medical ethics has developed with autonomy as its foundation, the field has ignored pediatric ethics. The book is resoundingly successful in its effort to rectify this problem.... [A] pleasure to read." -- Eric D. Kodish, M.D., Director, Rainbow Center for Pediatric Ethics, Case Western Reserve University Using a form of medical ethnography to investigate a variety of pediatric contexts, Richard B. Miller tests the fit of different ethical approaches in various medical settings to arrive at a new paradigm for how best to care for children. Miller contends that the principle of beneficence must take priority over autonomy in the treatment of children. Yet what is best for the child is a decision that doctors cannot make alone. In making and implementing such decisions, Miller argues, doctors must become part of a "therapeutic alliance" with families and the child undergoing medical care to come up with the best solution. Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine combines strong philosophical argumentation with firsthand knowledge of the issues facing children and families in pediatric care. This book will be an invaluable asset to medical ethicists and practitioners in pediatric care, as well as parents struggling with ethical issues in the care of their children.

This comprehensive anthology represents the key issues and problems in the field of medical ethics through the most up-to-date readings and case studies available. Each of the book's six parts is prefaced with helpful introductions that raise important questions and skillfully contextualize the positions and main points of the articles that follow.