Tag: Patrick Guinan
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Medical students’ attitudes toward torture
Jonathan BeanDavid NgHakan DemirtasPatrick Guinan This article was first published in TORTURE Journal, Volume 18, Number 2, 2008. Abstract Torture, whether it be domestic or war related, is a public health issue of current concern. It is the position of the American Medical Association (AMA), The World Medical Association (WMA), the United Nations Declaration and…
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Thomas Linacre: Catalyst for the Renaissance
Patrick GuinanChicago, Illinois, United States “Linacre led a life of devotion to learning, to medicine, and to the interests of humanity.”– William Osler Thomas Linacre, personal physician to King Henry VIII of England, was the founder and first president of the Royal College of Physicians of England. He is remarkable not so much for his…
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JB Murphy: Chicago’s great but controversial surgeon
Patrick GuinanGeorge DuneaChicago, Illinois, United States The grand surgical auditorium of the American College of Surgeons in Chicago still bears the name of JB Murphy, the tall, slim, blue-eyed boy from Appleton, Wisconsin, born in 1857 on a farm into an Irish family that escaped the horrors of the potato famine to make a new…
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Virgil and the Aeneid
Patrick GuinanChicago, Illinois, United States “Arma virumque canto” (“I sing of arms and of a man”) Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro 70 -19 BC), the greatest of the Augustan poets, was born in a village near Mantua and studied philosophy and rhetoric in Milan, Rome, and Naples. His literary career benefitted from the support and patronage…