Medicine, Morality, and Law

Catalog description

This course provides health sciences and other students with a background in the changing face of medical ethics over the last two hundred years. The course combines medical history, historical and contemporary biomedical ethics, philosophy of science, and political theory to create a framework for understanding the complexity and depth of the practitioner/patient relationship. At the end of the course, students will explore and interrogate the way in which the practical, ethical, legal, and political framework of modern American medicine supports or challenges foundational medical principles like patient autonomy and the Hippocratic Oath. Resources include works by William Osler on humanistic medicine as well as other foundational medical thinkers, classic works in bioethics, and historical and narrative accounts of the consequences of medical abuse. Examples of possible texts include archival documents related to the eugenics movement in 20th century America, letters and testimony from survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and contemporary texts and court cases that interrogate the connection between medical practice and human values and meaning.