Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Ethics

  • End-of-life care and contingent vs. non-contingent duties

    Ronald W. PiesBoston, Massachusetts, United States Introduction Mr. Joseph B, a 70-year-old widower and retired college professor, is hospitalized in the final stages of metastatic pancreatic carcinoma. His doctors estimate that he has “three or four weeks” to live. The patient is well aware of his prognosis, and, as he puts it, “I have come…

  • Is healthcare a right?

    Ronald PiesBoston, Massachusetts, United States Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Introduction In this paper, I examine the question of whether healthcare is regarded as a “basic human right” in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Though there are significant…

  • Medicine and dignity

    Richard TullyEdinburgh “The dignity of the human being” is a fairly commonplace phrase in various contexts. It is used often in pleas against, say, the dehumanizing conditions of slum culture, or in protests by Amnesty International against vicious prison environments. It was bandied about a good deal when ‘spare part’ surgery was first hitting the…

  • “(W)holistic”: The coining and the connotations

    Richard SobelNegev, Israel  Origin of the term Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950)—general, statesman, twice Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and philosopher, published his political treatise, “Holism and Evolution,” in 1926. It is said that Albert Einstein thought Smuts was one of only eleven people in the world who understood his Theory of Relativity.…

  • I’m not sure I’m so ethical

    Paul KettlPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, USA I’m not sure I’m so ethical. Don’t get me wrong. I think I’m a good doctor, and I don’t do bad things like sleep with my patients, beat my wife, or kick the dog. But I’m just not sure anymore I’m as ethical in my practice as I should be. It…

  • Has medicine lost the ethics battle?

    Patrick D. Guinan This article was first published in the May 1998 issue of Linacre Quarterly. Modern medicine began with the Greeks and has developed over the past 2,500 years. Medical ethics, which was also initiated by the Greeks, and summarized in the Hippocratic Oath, has guided the moral actions of the physician in his…

  • Is it ethical to bring religion into medicine?

    Patrick GuinanChicago, Illinois, USA Over 200 years ago Voltaire wrote that one half of metaphysics was known to everybody and that the other half will never be known. It is by no means certain that ethics has yet reached the same high degree of development. At the beginnings of recorded history, the priests and the…

  • The human condition

    Patrick D. GuinanChicago, Illinois, USA This article was previously published in Social Justice Review, Vol. 101, No. 5-6, May-June 2010, pp. 89-90 Introduction The human condition is the “totality of the experiences of being human and living human lives.”1 The exposition of this idea has occupied philosophers from the beginning, but more recently has been…

  • Must life always be prolonged?

    Patrick D. GuinanChicago, Illinois, United States This is an open-ended question and, for that reason, difficult to answer. We agree that life is a natural good and should not be willfully terminated (self-defense and a just war being exceptions). But in many instances life can be prolonged, almost indefinitely, by such means as parenteral enterostomal gastrostomy…

  • Can Hippocrates save modern medicine? A plea to return to our roots

    Patrick GuinanChicago, Illinois, United States Modern medicine is in the midst of a morale crisis. In this brief review I will attempt to 1.) explain why, 2.) note that medicine has abrogated control of its destiny, and 3.) suggest that a return to the Hippocratic doctor-patient relationship can save medicine. This crisis is manifested, to…