John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine / Edition 1

by Laurence B. McCullough

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048149841
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	12/09/2010
Series:	Philosophy and Medicine , #56
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1998
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

A study of the medical ethics of John Gregory (1724-1773), who wrote the first English language bioethics. Provides a complete intellectual biography of Gregory, placing his medical ethics in its 18th-century contexts of Scottish enlightenment history and culture, Baconian science and philosophy of medicine practice, the feminine and feminist philosophy of the Bluestocking Circle, and moral sense philosophy, particularly David Hume's concept of sympathy. Considers the implications of Gregory's medical ethics for contemporary bioethics, especially feminist bioethics. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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