First Things: On the Square >> The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn

This is an important article by Patrick C. Beeman on the future of the profession of medicine. To take a snippet from the opening of this article:

Where is the profession of medicine going? Has it become simply applied biology, another “job” among equally good ways of earning a living? What kind of person should the physician be? What about bioethics? Is patient autonomy the only viable moral absolute? Oh, and—who is Dr. Edmund Pellegrino?

In The Philosophy of Medicine Reborn: A Pellegrino Reader, Tristram Engelhardt, a bellwether of bioethics, and Fabrice Jotterand, who holds a dual appointment within the University of Texas system as assistant professor of philosophy and “psychiatry and clinical sciences,” have answered these questions by offering nineteen selections from Edmund Pellegrino’s six hundred articles and twenty-four books.

At one time or another, Pellegrino was director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics; president of the Catholic University of America; professor of medicine at Yale University; president and chairman of the board of directors at Yale–New Haven Medical Center; and dean of the School of Medicine at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and has seen patients and taught junior clinicians throughout his career.

The article is a very important one.