Making Modern Medical Ethics

How African Americans, Anti-Nazis, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Whistleblowing Moralists Created Bioethics

Robert Baker, Arthur L. Caplan

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780262377409
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

In Making Modern Medical Ethics, Robert Baker tells the counter history of the birth of bioethics, bringing to the fore the stories of the dissenters and whistleblowers who challenged the establishment. Drawing on his earlier work on moral revolutions and the history of medical ethics, Baker traces the history of modern medical ethics and its bioethical turn to the moral insurrections incited by the many unsung dissenters and whistleblowers: African American civil rights leaders, Jewish Americans harboring Holocaust memories, feminists, women, and Anglo-American physicians and health care professionals who were veterans of the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.

The standard narrative for bioethics typically emphasizes the morally disruptive medical technologies of the latter part of the twentieth century, such as the dialysis machine, the electroencephalograph, and the ventilator, as they created the need to reconsider traditional notions of medical ethics. Baker, however, tells a fresh narrative, one that has historically been neglected (e.g., the story of the medical veterans who founded an international medical organization to rescue medicine and biomedical research from the scandal of Nazi medicine), and also reveals the penalties that moral change agents paid (e.g., the stubborn bureaucrat who was demoted for her insistence on requiring and enforcing research subjects' informed consent). Analyzing major statements of modern medical ethics from the 1946–1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials and Nuremberg Code to A Patient's Bill of Rights, Making Modern Medical Ethics is a winning history of just how respect and autonomy for patients and research subjects came to be codified.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Events Referenced
• Acronyms, Jargon, and Non-English Words
• Who’s Who: People Referenced
• 1. Moralists and True Scandals: Medical Ethics during the Pre- and Interwar Periods
• 2. Nazi Medical Ethics
• 3. The Nuremberg Doctors Trial and the Nuremberg Code
• 4. The Declaration of Geneva: Old Things Become New
• 5. The Declaration of Helsinki: Negotiating Practical Principles for Research on Human Subjects
• 6. Kelsey, Pappworth, and Beecher: Moral Awakenings
• 7. Protesting the USPHS’s Syphilis Study: Gibson, Schatz, Buxtun, and Jenkins
• 8. Scientistic Medical Paternalism and Its Discontents
• 9. Reforming Modern Medical Ethics
• 10. The Bioethical Turn in Modern Medical Ethics
• 11. Making the Unseen Visible: A Metahistorical Analysis of Why the Role of Anti-Nazism and the Names of Significant Blacks, Bureaucrats, Feminists, Veterans, and Most Whistleblowing Moralists Are Absent from, or Minimally Noted in, Standard Histories of Bioethics
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List