Medical Ethics

Front Cover
Robert M. Veatch
Jones & Bartlett Learning, 1997 - Medical - 461 pages
This is a thoroughly revised new edition of a 1989 book, edited by one of the premier medical ethicists in the field. The original conception was that medical ethics had grown so significantly that a textbook should be produced modeled on those in medicine itself, with chapters contributed by leading authorities who would summarize issues and developments in their subspecialty. Major changes in the past five years in medical ethics, including rethinking the role of principles and new ethical issues, necessitated the revised edition. The audience is primarily students of medical ethics, either health professionals or preprofessionals, although established professionals and ethicists will also find the book helpful. Each chapter begins with a summary of issues to be explored and concludes with questions and references for further study. This version retains the original contributors and adds two new ones for chapters on AIDS and on healthcare reform. The earlier chapters are devoted to professional codes of ethics, ethical theories, concepts of health and disease, and the doctor-patient relationship, and the later ones to specific ethical issues of reproduction, human experimentation, consent, genetics, organ transplantation, psychiatric issues, allocation of health care, death and dying, AIDS, and healthcare reform. Chapter authors are the leading authorities in these topics. In this excellent update of an important text, the topics reflect the public policy orientation of the editor. Missing are many clinical ethics issues.

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Contents

An Introduction
1
The Normative Principles of Medical Ethics
29
The Concepts of Health Illness and Disease
57
The PhysicianPatient Relationship
75
Limiting Procreation
103
Human Experimentation
135
Informed Consent
185
Reproductive Technologies and Genetics
209
Ethical Issues in Organ Transplantation
239
The Role of Value
275
Discussion Questions
316
Death and Dying
363
AIDS and Ethics
395
National HealthCare Reform
415
Glossary
443
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

Robert Veatch is currently a professor of medical ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. For ten years previously, he was on the staff of the Hastings Center (formerly the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences). Veatch was born in Utica, New York, and received a B.S. degree from Purdue University (1961), an M.S. from the University of California at San Francisco (1962), and a B.D. (1964), M.A.(1970), and Ph.D. (1971) from Harvard University. A lecturer and writer, Veatch is the author of many important books on ethical issues in biology and medicine. Veatch's areas of interest center on the relation of science to public policy, death and dying, and experimentation on human subjects. He has worked both to assemble numerous case studies and to advance general theoretical reflection in these areas. In A Theory of Medical Ethics (1981), he argues that current medical codes such as the Hippocratic Oath are too restrictive and lack sufficient support for comprehensive use in the medical profession. The solution, he argues, is that medicine can no longer be based on a professionally articulated code. Instead, Veatch proposes a "covenant" theory of medical ethics that resembles the traditional social contract of philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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