Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics

✍ Scribed by George Weisz (auth.), George Weisz (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 292
• Series: Culture, Illness, and Healing 16
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Medical or hio- ethics has in recent years been a growth industry. Journals, Centers and Associations devoted to the subject proliferate. Medical schools seem increasingly to be filling rare positions in the humanities and social sciences with ethicists. Hardly a day passes without some media scrutiny of one or another ethical dilemma resulting from our new-found ability to transform the natural conditions of life. Although bioethics is a self-consciously interdisciplinary field, it has not attracted the collaboration of many social scientists. In fact, social scientists who specialize in the study of medicine have in many cases watched its development with a certain ambivalence. No one disputes the significance and often the painfulness of the issues and choices being addressed. But there is something about the way these issues are usually handled which seems somehow inappropri­ ate if not wrong-headed to one trained in a discipline like sociology or history. In their analyses of complex situations, ethicists often appear grandly oblivious to the social and cultural context in which these occur, and indeed to empirical referents of any sort. Nor do they seem very conscious of the cultural specificity of many of the values and procedures they utilize when making ethical judg­ ments. The unease felt by many in the social sciences was given articulate expression in a paper by Renee Fox and Judith Swazey which appeared in 1984.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction....Pages 3-15
Front Matter....Pages 17-17
Clinical Trials and the Collective Ethic: The Case of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and the Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis....Pages 19-39
Biomedical Rituals and Informed Consent: Native Canadians and the Negotiation of Clinical Trust....Pages 41-63
Moral Conflicts in a Psychiatric Hospital Treating Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)....Pages 65-82
Institutional Factors Affecting Psychiatric Admission and Commitment Decisions....Pages 83-96
Front Matter....Pages 97-97
Reaching Consensus About Death: Heart Transplants and Cultural Identity in Japan....Pages 99-119
Ethics, Politics and Contraception: Canada and the Licensing of Depo-Provera....Pages 121-141
Front Matter....Pages 143-143
The Origins of Medical Ethics in France: The International Congress of Morale Médicale of 1955....Pages 145-161
The British General Medical Council and Medical Ethics....Pages 163-184
Human Experimentation and the Origins of Bioethics in the United States....Pages 185-200
The Evolution of American Bioethics: A Sociological Perspective....Pages 201-217
Front Matter....Pages 219-219
Medical Anthropology and the Comparative Study of Medical Ethics....Pages 221-239
Morality and the Social Sciences....Pages 241-260
Ethics and Ethnography in Neonatal Intensive Care....Pages 261-272
Back Matter....Pages 273-297

✦ Subjects

Ethics; Anthropology; Sociology, general