Science, Technology, and the Art of Medicine contains papers by eminent scholars who discuss issues and concepts regarding the character of medicine. Special attention is given to the extent to which medicine is a science, art, and technology. Investigations are carried out with a particular focus on the nature of medical knowledge. Concepts of medical research, medical causality, intuition, and medical decision-making are examined in the light of medicine's revolutionary advances in the twentieth century. Past perspectives and present perplexities are also examined, bringing...

The editors of the Philosophy and Medicine series recognize with grat itude the foresight, understanding, hard labor, and patience of Prof. Kazumasa Hoshino. It is his perseverance that has made this volume a reality. It was his faith in ideas that brought together a cluster of scholars in Tokyo on September 2-4, 1994, at Sophia University for a U. S. -J apan Bioethics Congress. With the support of the Foundation for Advance ment of International Science, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, the Foundation of Thanatology, the Japanese Center for Quality of Life Studies, and...

Debate regarding organ sales is largely innocent of the history of thought on the matter. This volume seeks to remedy this shortcoming. Positions for or against a market in human organs are nested within moral intuitions, ontological or political theoretical premises, or understandings of special moral concerns, such as permissible uses of the body, which have a long history of analysis. The essays compass the views of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Mill and Christianity, as well as particular methodological approaches, such as the phenomenology of the body, natural...

K. Danner Clouser is one of the most important figures in establishing and shaping the fields of medical ethics, bioethics, and the philosophy of education in the second half of the twentieth century. Clouser challenged many established approaches to moral theory and offered innovative strategies for integrating the humanities into professional education, especially that of physicians and nurses. The contributions published in Building Bioethics: Conversations with Clouser and Friends on Medical Ethics are unique both in their devotion to a critical review of his contributions, and...

The term bioethics' was coined in 1971, just as interest in the medical humanities claimed a prominent place in medical education. Out of this interest, a substantial area of research and scholarship took shape: the philosophy of medicine. This field has been directed to the epistemological, ontological, and value-theoretical issues occasioned by medicine and the biomedical sciences. Bioethics is nested in this field and can only be fully understood in terms of the foundational issues it addresses. This collection of essays in honor of Stuart F. Spicker, one of the individuals who gave shape...

This volume is written for scholars and analysts in the field of health policy, philosophy of health care, and biomedical ethics, particularly the ethics of resource allocation and the just distribution of scarce resources. The book provides students and scholars with an improved understanding of solidarity as a fundamental value in health care and social care, by comparing it with traditional approaches to justice, fairness, and individual freedom. In addition, the reader is provided with empirical evidence of the socio-cultural views of solidarity, which may contribute to a better...

MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT The Human Genome Project (HGP) is now almost completed. A draft of the full DNA sequence of the human genome has recently been published (lnt. Hum. Gen. Seq. Cons., 2001; Venter et al., 2001). The project started in 1990 and was planned to be completed fifteen years later. lt is now clearly ahead of schedule. But even when the project is completed much work remains-the analysis of the function of the 30-40,000 genes in the human genome is beyond the scope of the project and willlast for decades. However, even before the HGP started, it was...

A clear understanding of the concept of health plays a key role in defining what health care should comprise and in developing adequate strategies for overcoming the current "health care crisis." This volume is the result of an international and interdisciplinary cooperation between medicine and philosophy on the current debate on the concept of health.
Besides offering a critical analysis of the WHO definition and a review of both ancient and contemporary conceptions of health, the cooperative effort of physicians and philosophers presented in this book works through the challenges which...

lt is with great pleasure that I write this preface for Or Li's book, wh ich addresses the venerable and vexing issues surrounding the problem of whether death can be a harm to the person who dies. This problem is an ancient one which was raised long ago by the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, who notoriously argued that death is at no time a harm to its 'victim' because before death there is no harrn and after death there is no victim. Epicurus's conclusion is conspicuously at odds with our prereflective- and in most cases our post-reflective-intuitions, and numerous strategies have...

in the culture of medicine, and they saw their mission as a generation of profit for stockholders, not necessarily medical care for clients. Cost-effective medicine was the goal in the context of a profit-making enterprise. Although preventive health care programs were promised, very few were realized and they were not nearly comprehensive. The definition of unnecessary testing slowly expanded to mean virtually any high-cost test requiring the service of a medical specialist, and low priced generalist physicians with limited diagnostic and therapeutic skills were made available to patients...