6.0 Abstract
A centrally important aspect of the quality of a doctor’s practice of medicine obviously is its ethics. Preparatory to grappling with the principles of medical ethics is introduction to ideas about ethics in general and also to those about professional ethics more specifically.
The core principle of professional ethics specific to medicine can, I suggest, be deduced from the general essence of genuinely medical professions (Section 4.1.1) together with the Aristotelian principle of ethics – the pursuit of happiness by means of the virtue of cultivating excellence in oneself – applied to oneself as a doctor.
Against this backdrop it is of interest to examine the oath of physicians the formulation of which is (falsely) attributed to ‘The Father of Medicine’ (Section 1.1). Also, examination of major examples of amoral practices of medicine is instructive.
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Miettinen, O.S. (2015). Ethical Principles of Medicine. In: Medicine as a Scholarly Field: An Introduction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19012-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19012-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19011-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19012-9
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