CONCEIVING MODERN MEDICAL ETHICS: THE EDINBURGH REFORMERS

Six reformers collectively conceived of modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world. Five were physicians and Dissenters, that is, people who would not sign the Church of England's thirty-nine Articles of Faith. These Dissenters were a persecuted minority in England, officially excluded from all “official acts” that had a religious dimension, such as marriage and burial, or that required the swearing of official oaths – a prohibition that prevented them from holding public office, serving on a jury, or attending Cambridge or Oxford University (Haakonssen 1997, 94–6). Forced to seek a medical education outside of these elite universities, all five physician–reformers were affiliated with the University of Edinburgh. Listed in order of their birth the five physicians are: John Gregory (1724–1773) an Edinburgh University faculty member whose lectures on sympathy left an indelible imprint on Anglo-American medical morality (see Chapter); Samuel Bard (1742–1821) a New York physician, whose Discourse on the Duties of A Physician (Bard 1769) was the first published work on “medical ethics” by an Edinburgh reformer (see Chapter 31); Thomas Percival of Manchester, England, (1740–1804), who coined the expression “medical ethics” in his eponymous work Medical Ethics (1803); Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphian (1745–1813) who attended Gregory's Edinburgh lectures and who would later (1809–1811) lecture American medical students at the University of Pennsylvania in the same vein (see Chapter 31); and, the lone Catholic dissenter in the group, Irish obstetrician and Edinburgh alumnus, Michael Ryan (1800–1841), the first person to style himself a professor of medical ethics (see Chapter 1).