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Medical ethics is the field of applied ethics that deals with ethical principles and values which guide the medical profession and practice. The term “medical ethics” was coined by the Thomas Percival, a physician from Manchester, United Kingdom, who published a book under this title in 1803. Percival deals with duties of the physician and the physician-patient relationship. These and other still ongoing issues such as abortion and euthanasia date back to the beginnings of medicine as the Hippocratic Oath famously testifies (Baker and McCullough 2008). The field of medical ethics with its current set of topics, theories, and methods emerged in the 1970s. Social change and value pluralism, new medical technologies such as organ transplantation, and new developments in the life sciences and their application led to this development of a new discipline of applied ethics, which is sometimes also labelled biomedical ethics or bioethics...
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Ehni, HJ. (2021). Medical Ethics. In: Gu, D., Dupre, M.E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22009-9_398
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