Abstract
Thomas Percival died in 1804, the year after the publication of Medical Ethics, 1 leaving nineteenth-century physicians free to appropriate his words without fear of contradiction from their author. The appropriation process began just four years after Percival’s death, when the Boston medical society used his language to draft their medical police of 1808.2 As American municipal, county, state and national medical organizations organized themselves from 1808 to 1846,3 they followed the Boston precedent of prefacing their charters with codes of medical police or ethics, borrowing most of their language from Percival.4 The process culminated in 1846 with the founding of what was to be the first national medical society, the American Medical Association (AMA). As the AMA still acknowledges, its original code of ethics drew heavily on Percival’s words.
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Baker, R. (1993). Deciphering Percival’s Code. In: Baker, R., Porter, D., Porter, R. (eds) The Codification of Medical Morality. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 45. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8228-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8228-5_9
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