St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Aug 2024)
The History of Medical Ethics
Abstract
Medical ethics has three interrelated but distinguishable meanings: guild etiquette and moral expectations for physicians; moral concerns directly related to treatment protocols (including issues of patients’ rights); and the general moral assessment of health promotion and disease prevention (including public health, environmental protection, and advanced research into areas such as genetic modification and transhuman digital technologies). The first-listed definition was the primary understanding of ‘medical ethics’ until the mid-twentieth century. The term ‘bioethics’ (as distinguished from ‘medical ethics’) is sometimes used for all three, but is most often applied to the latter. The special concerns of medical ethics are strongly shaped by other cultural debates and by the metaethical defining of the physical body. Consideration of the body-soul or body-mind relationship has been central in medical ethical discourse since the Graeco-Roman period, through the earliest days in Christianity, and up through the period of Islamic Golden Age. The cultural factors impacting specific applications for medical ethics, however, have changed with societal shifting and done so frequently. In other words, specific topics and foci have changed rapidly, especially over the past one hundred years, while broad ethical themes have tended to remain constant. The two themes that have been most important for the past 2000 years in medical ethics have been vocational virtuosity and the hylomorphic question. To address both the discipline’s state of flux and also these underlying constants, an historical approach is taken for this encyclopaedic entry, with specific issues that are currently of concern noted throughout.
