Seeking Medicine’s Moral Centre

For the first time in two millennia, the Hippocratic ethic of medical care has been supplanted by a new bioethics. The bottom-up set of injunctions to care, of the patient and for society, has been replaced by a top-down, commercial ethic focused on patient autonomy in a limited system of medical care.

To understand this transformation, and its the effect, Seeking Medicine’s Moral Centre focuses on the issue of “medical aid in dying,” (MAiD) in Canada. Uniquely, it introduces ethnography as a tool to parse a set of academic and public articles reflecting the changing face of medical ethics from 1996 to the present. In doing so it joins the professional and the popular as a single dataset.

It is the first book to seriously critique bioethics as a medical ethic through its focus on medical aid in dying as a still contested program in care of the chronically ill and fragile.

Key audiences include journalists, medical anthropologists and sociologists; ethicists and bioethicists; medical and scientific researchers and policy makers.