What is Medical Ethics ?

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A primary role of medical ethics is to "structure" the disputed issues — i.e., by detailing the relevant principles and implications, analyzing the pivotal concepts, and focusing on the relevant facts.

Medical ethics is limited by being unable to discriminate finely, so that a single line of action can seldom be determined by moral criteria alone.

Underlying many criticisms of medical ethics is the failure to realize that medical ethics as such is not a reform movement or an effort to inspire moral behavior, that it is not and cannot be a specialist's body of esoteric knowledge, that it requires facts and conceptual analyses from other fields to do its work, and that value arguments can be carried farther than one generally expects.

Medical ethics, principles, persons, and perspectives is discussed under three headings: History, Theory, and Practice.

Medical ethics has a long history, not least in Edinburgh. In 1774, writing to Professor William Cullen, Adam Smith remarked that the “present acknowledged superiority” of the Edinburgh medical faculty was due to the fact that its professors were paid by results

the great economist saw the Invisible Hand at work in the classroom, even he had doubts about its reach beyond graduation.

“A degree [he wrote] can pretend to give security for nothing but the science of the graduate; and even for that it can give but a very slender security

The first came from Thomas Percival. Percival was an Edinburgh medical student from 1761 to 1765, when he left to complete his degree at Leyden.

Thirty years later, he had become physician to the Manchester Infirmary, where traditional relationships between physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries were strained and fractious.

His colleagues invited him to arbitrate, by drawing up a set of rules and regulations to put matters on a more modern and harmonious footing. Percival agreed, and eventually, in 1803, published his Code of Institutes and Precepts adapted to the Professional Conduct of Physicians and Surgeons, under the title of Medical Ethics

It was the first English book with that title, and was to be enormously influential, especially in the United States. The American Medical Association—for example, acknowledged that its “Code of Medical Ethics”, issued in 1847

Percival’s Medical Ethics was a reinterpretation of the old Hippocratic guild ethos, seen through the eyes of an 18th century medical officer and Christian gentleman, and adapted to meet the needs of a new scientific and industrial, but still hierarchical and often deferential, society

It was a prospectus for the style of professional medical ethics, self regulating, paternalistic, and often benign, which typically prevailed until around the middle of the 20th century.

Medical ethics is the set of ethical rules that doctors follow. These ideas tell doctors how they should treat patients.

It was a prospectus for the style of professional medical ethics, self regulating, paternalistic, and often benign, which typically prevailed until around the middle of the 20th century.

Medical ethics is a system of moral principles that apply values to the practice of clinical medicine and in scientific researc

a second, very different answer came from John Gregory. Gregory held the chair of physick at Edinburgh from 1766 until his death in 1773, and during that time delivered and published a series of Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician.

The earliest set of ethical ideas in medicine was the Hippocratic oath. (An oath is a special promise.) It was supposed to be written by Hippocrates but probably was not written by him.

Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict

If there is not enough of a medicine to treat every person who has a disease who should get the medicine?

A physician, he believed, had a positive moral duty to be “ready to acknowledge and rectify his mistakes”

These values include the respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice

Medical ethics involves examining a specific problem, usually a clinical case, and using values, facts, and logic to decide what the best course of action should be.

Too many were not, however, and one reason for this, Gregory argued, lay in the nature of medical practice itself. While “no profession requires so comprehensive a mind as medicine”, he wrote, in medicine also there was “no established authority to which we can refer in doubtful cases. Every physician must rest on his own judgment, which appeals for its rectitude to nature and experience alone”