Edmund Pellegrino’s Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine: An Overview

It might seem ironic that the author in this mini-symposium who knew Edmund Pellegrino the best should be the one whose essay is the least personal, eschewing anecdote and reminiscence and concentrating on the substance of his scholarly contribution. I think, however, that for Ed, an exposition of his ideas would be the most fitting tribute one could offer. Accordingly, I will attempt to outline his main ideas and bring together his disparate writings in a constructive manner. I do this firstly because there really is no other such brief exposition of his main ideas anywhere in the bioethics literature. Moreover, Pellegrino himself made no attempt to provide an explicit synthesis of his various writings on various topics, and so I will attempt to make explicit a number of implicit connections. Lastly, inasmuch as bioethics has developed dramatically as a field over the last 40 years, there may be young scholars who are unfamiliar with Pellegrino’s truly seminal work. A brief overview of his body of scholarship might spur them to go to the primary sources. If I succeed in interesting such persons in reading the work of Edmund Pellegrino, or inspire others to look again at that work with fresh eyes, I believe they will be richly rewarded.