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

The go-to textbook on the increasingly important and rapidly evolving topic of medical ethics

A Doody's Core Title for 2024 & 2023!

Ethical issues are embedded in every clinical encounter between patients and clinicians. In order to practice excellent clinical care, clinicians must understand ethical issues such as informed consent, decisional capacity, surrogate decision making, truth telling, confidentiality, privacy, the distinction between research and clinical care, and end-of-life care. This popular, clinically-oriented guide provides crystal-clear case-based coverage of the ethical situations encountered in everyday medical practice.

Clinical Ethics introduces the proven Four Box Method--a much-needed pattern for collecting, sorting, and ordering the facts of a clinical ethical problem. This easy-to-apply system is based on simple questions about medical indications, patient preferences, quality of life, and contextual features that explain clinical ethics and help clinicians formulate a sound diagnosis and treatment strategy. In each chapter, the authors discuss case examples and provide analysis, comments, and specific recommendations.

The book is divided into the four topics that constitute the essential ethical structure of every clinical encounter:

• Medical Indications
• Preferences of Patients
• Quality of Life
• Contextual Features

Bioethics Beyond the Headlines is a primer in bioethics. You will not find convoluted philosophical arguments in this volume. Rather, you will find an engaging sampling of the key questions in bioethics, including euthanasia, assisted reproduction, cloning and stem cells, neuroscience, access to healthcare, and even research on animals and questions of environmental ethics-areas typically overlooked in general introductions to bioethics.

In this engaging study, the authors put casuistry into its historical context, tracing the origin of moral reasoning in antiquity, its peak during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and its subsequent fall into disrepute from the mid-seventeenth century.

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.

Bioethics Beyond the Headlines is a primer in bioethics. You will not find convoluted philosophical arguments in this volume. Rather, you will find an engaging sampling of the key questions in bioethics, including euthanasia, assisted reproduction, cloning and stem cells, neuroscience, access to healthcare, and even research on animals and questions of environmental ethics-areas typically overlooked in general introductions to bioethics.

Government agencies and commissions, courts, and legislatures have during the past several decades produced reports, rendered decisions, and passed laws that have both defined the fundamental issues in the field of bioethics and established ways of managing them in our society. Providing a history of these key bioethical decisions, this Source Book in Bioethics is the first and only comprehensive collection of the critical public documents in biomedical ethics, including many hard-to-find or out-of-print materials.

Covering the period from 1947 to 1995, this volume brings together core legislative documents, court briefs, and reports by professional organizations, public bodies, and governments around the world. Sections on human experimentation, care of the terminally ill, genetics, human reproduction, and emerging areas in bioethics include such pivotal works as The Nuremberg Code, The Tuskegee Report, and In the Matter of Baby M, as well less readily available documents as The Declaration of Inuyama, the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences statement on genetic engineering, and The Warnock Committee Report on reproductive technologies from the United Kingdom. Three eminent scholars in the field provide brief introductions to each document explaining the significance of these classic sources.

This historical volume will be a standard text for courses in bioethics, health policy, and death and dying, and a primary reference for anyone interested in this increasingly relevant field.