INTRODUCTION
In the year 1700, a member of the French Bourbon royal family ascended the Spanish throne, ending two centuries of Habsburg rule. This dynastic change was of vital importance for Spain because it placed eighteenth-century Spanish culture, including philosophy, medicine, and ethics, under French influence, inspiring in the second half of the eighteenth century a pro-Enlightenment elite to modernize all aspects of Spanish life and culture. Their challenge to traditional ideologies culminated in a collision between the traditionalists and the Enlightenment, the consequences of which remain visible even today.
This clash of ideologies sets the context in which a new philosophical approach to medicine arose, creating a literature that we would today characterize as “medical ethics.” This chapter contrasts this new medical ethics, grounded in the experientially based medicine and championed by partisans of the Enlightenment, with the traditional, pre-Enlightenment texts of moral theology. Its final topic is medical etiquette, as explored in texts written by physicians.
THE VOICE OF THEOLOGIANS: MEDICINE AND MORALS
Roman Catholic cultures have traditionally reserved the analysis of the moral problems related with life and death, the use of the body, and sexuality to priests and theologians. What came to be called “medical ethics” was considered a part of moral theology. Catholic moral theology employed a mix of casuistry, Canon Law, and moral reasoning to address moral questions.