The History And Bioethics Of Medical Education

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.

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.

​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.

Most medical schools in the US, Canada and UK now incorporate some form of arts and humanities-based teaching into their curricula. What happens in residency is another story. Most postgraduate programs do not continue the thread of such teaching although many residents would like to deepen their understanding of the medical humanities before they move into practice. The humanities emphasize "the human side of medicine," and can provide a counterpoint to the reductionism of evidence-based medicine and technological hubris for young doctors as they apply new knowledge and skills in ambiguous, real-life encounters with patients who are living with complicated health problems. Humanities-based education can help both sides of the relationship: programs are shown to reduce burnout and mental health issues in young physicians, and can also help learning practitioners grapple with the most difficult aspects of their craft: how does one persuade patients on a course of treatment, while respecting informed consent? How does one work with families? How does one listen to and treat patients exhibiting self-harm tendencies? Available research may demonstrate the efficacy of such exposures, but provide little practical advice or resources for setting up programs across specialty and sub-specialty disciplines. Health Humanities in Post-Graduate Medical Education will fill this gap in knowledge translation for the thousands of residency programs worldwide, allowing educators, supervisors, and residents themselves to create robust and educationally sound workshops, seminars, study groups, lecture series, research and arts-based projects, publications and events.

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.

This book presents and elaborates on how the teaching of global ethics in healthcare contributes to furthering ideals of cosmopolitanism: solidarity, equality, respect for differences and concern with what human beings, and specifically patients have in common, regardless of where they live and who they are. Global problems such as pandemic diseases, disasters, lack of care and medication, homelessness and displacement call for global responses. The new area of global bioethics is providing answers by arguing that ethical discourse should first of all criticize the structures of violence and injustice that underlie many threats to global health. Education of health professionals should articulate that they are ‘citizens of the world’, like their patients. This book first demonstrates that a moral vision of global education is necessary to gain a global dimension. It is argued that a global framework of ethical principles is available; the challenge is to elaborate and specify that framework into specific educational approaches and models. The book subsequently analyzes goals and challenges of global education in biomedicine and healthcare. It is shown how such challenges (e.g. inequities and cultural differences) can be overcome. Finally, the book presents concrete examples (cases, methods, and practices) of global education in bioethics. The unique feature of the book is that it addresses global education challenges specifically in the area of healthcare, medicine, and medical science. It combines two areas of research and experience that are usually not connected: global bioethics and global education. This book is written for all those involved in global ethics teaching in medicine, nursing, ethics, philosophy, law, and theology courses.

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.

"Bioethics for Medical Education".