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.

Klappentext

This is the first book-length scholarly study of the medical ethics of John Gregory (1724-1773), who wrote the first English-language bioethics. This book shows how Gregory invented professional medical ethics and, in the process, the concept of the profession of medicine as a fiduciary profession. Making extensive use of manuscript and other primary sources, the book provides the first complete intellectual biography of Gregory, placing his medical ethics in its eighteenth-century contexts of Scottish Enlightenment history and culture, Baconian science and philosophy of medicine, medical practice, the feminine and feminist philosophy of the Bluestocking Circle, and moral sense philosophy, particularly David Hume's concept of sympathy. A detailed examination of his texts on medical ethics is followed by a consideration of the implications of Gregory's medical ethics for contemporary bioethics, especially feminist bioethics. This book is intended for scholars, teachers, and students of bioethics, medical ethics, the history of medicine, and the history of medical ethics.

Inhalt
An Introduction to John Gregory'S Medical Ethics.- John Gregory's Life and Times: An Intellectual History.- John Gregory's Medical Ethics.- Assessing Gregory's Medical Ethics.