The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (review)

Medical ethics exists today in two broad categories: the first category covers philosophical medical ethics, where ethicists reflect on current issues such as the ethics of multiple births, physician-assisted suicide, and abortion. The second category is aligned in medical schools with teaching professionalism and concerns norms of behavior and the virtues of a good physician. In doing the former, one might analyze the concept of compassion; in modeling the latter, one might teach a medical student how to deliver bad news.

In this work, the editors have given us medical ethics largely in the second category and with an emphasis, as the title indicates, on both the history of professional codes and the history of such medical codes in countries around the globe.

For the medical library, or section on the history of medicine of a standard library, which wants to know about the history of such norms in medicine in Japan, Germany, and North America, this will be a useful volume. For someone expecting articles on the ethics of face transplants, egg donation, or gender-reassignment surgery, this is not the book, but of course, that is not what the editors intended it to be.

The editors divided the sixty-three articles by various scholars in medical ethics and history of medicine into eight broad sections: An Introduction to the History of Medical Ethics; A Chronology of Medical Ethics; Discourses on Medical Ethics Through the Life Cycle; The Discourses of Religion on Medical Ethics, The Discourses on Philosophy on Medical Ethics; The Discourses of Practitioners on Medical Ethics; The Discourses of Bioethics; and The Discourses on Medical Ethics and Research.

Scholars in various fields wrote the individual essays. Essays on the history of Catholic Medical Ethics and Islamic Medical ethics appear to be excellent, and these articles fall under the section on Religion and Medical Ethics, which contains nine articles.

Five articles in a sub-section on "Medical Ethics and Health Policy," are written by known scholars who survey an area of their expertise: Renée Fox and Judith Swazey on Organ Transplantation in the United States, Ronald Bayer and Barron Lerner on the History of Public Health Ethics in the United States, and Robert Veatch on Defining and Redefining Life and Death. Much more common are articles such as "Medical Ethics and the Communism of Eastern Europe," "Medical Ethics and Nazism," and "Medical Ethics and the Military in South Africa during Apartheid: Judging History." These fall under a section entitled, "Medical Ethics, Imperialism, and the Nation State."

All in all, this is a useful compendium of articles on internal norms of the medical profession throughout history and in different societies, especially in their religious aspects (which, of course, permeated the times of most of the history of medicine). It also contains a well-thought-out index and a truly excellent bibliography.