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Medical ethics is primarily a field of applied ethics, the study of moral values and judgments as they apply to medicine.As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practicalapplication in clinical settings as well as work on its history,philosophy, theology, and sociology.
Medical ethics tends to be understood narrowly as an applied professional ethics, whereas bioethics appears to have worked more expansive concerns, touching upon the philosophy of science and the critique of biotechnology.Still, the two fields often overlap and the distinction is more amatter of style than professional consensus. Medical ethics shares manyprinciples with other branches of healthcare ethics, such as nursing ethics.
There are various ethical guidelines. The Declaration of Helsinki is regarded as one of the most authoritative.[1]
By the 18th and 19th centuries, medicalethics emerged as a more self-conscious discourse. For instance,authors such as the British Doctor Thomas Percival (1740-1804) of Manchesterwrote about "medical jurisprudence" and reportedly coined the phrase"medical ethics." Percival's guidelines related to physicianconsultations have been criticized as being excessively protective ofthe home physician's reputation. Jeffrey Berlant is one such critic whoconsiders Percival's codes of physician consultations as being an earlyexample of the anti-competitive, "guild"-like nature of the physiciancommunity.[2][3] In 1847, the American Medical Association adopted its first code of ethics, with this being based in large part upon Percival's work [2]. While the secularized field borrowed largely from Catholic medical ethics, in the 20th century a distinctively liberal Protestant approach was articulated by thinkers such as Joseph Fletcher. In the 1960s and 1970s, building upon liberal theory and procedural justice, much of the discourse of medical ethics went through a dramatic shift and largely reconfigured itself into bioethics.[4]
Since the 1970s, the growing influence of ethics in contemporary medicine can be seen in the increasing use of Institutional Review Boards to evaluate experiments on human subjects, the establishment of hospital ethics committees, the expansion of the role of clinician ethicists, and the integration of ethics into many medical school curricula.[5]
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