INTRODUCTION

The discourses of British practitioners in the early eighteenth century focused on relationships among practitioners, in response to the intensely competitive, entrepreneurial world of medicine at the time. This has been labeled “etiquette” in the history of medicine and bioethics literature, implying that the subject matter of this discourse was practitioners’ behavior toward other practitioners, which was largely the case, and also implying that there was no intellectual content to it, which was not the case. There was indeed intellectual content to this discourse of medical morality, namely, an ethos of personal honor or self-regard. By the middle of the century a distinctive discourse about moral virtues of physicians begins to emerge in Scotland, at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, to which was joined an embryonic philosophy of medicine, from Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and a discourse about the intellectual virtues of physicians. There was, however, no clear intellectual foundation for this discourse of the intellectual and moral virtues of physicians.

By the latter third of the century, a philosophically sophisticated discourse about medical morality emerged. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment, this medical ethics was grounded in an account of the intellectual and moral virtues required of physicians as professionals committed to a life of service to science and patients.