"This historical analysis highlights ways in which the reflections on the role of character, moral obligations, and the relationship between the individual and the community (which stimulates contemporary bioethics) have a history that reaches deep into the past and across cultural boundaries...An important resource for a discipline just beginning to discover its historical roots."
Choice "Albert Jonsen, a distiguished theoretician and practitioner of bioethics, has written what is essentially a prehisotry of the field...A Short History of Medical Ethics is a scholarly prologue to the evolving world of contemporary bioethics...Not surprisingly, A Short History of Medical Ethics is at least as useful for what it tells us about earlier societies as it is for what it tells us about bioethics."
New England Journal of Medicine "This historical analysis highlights ways in which the reflections on the role of character, moral obligations, and the relationship between the individual and the community (which stimulates contemporary bioethics) have a history that reaches deep into the past and across cultural boundaries...An important resource for a discipline just beginning to discover its historical roots."
Choice "As Jonsen shows, the history of medical ethics is not short, despite the title of his book. In about one hundred and twenty pages he tells the story of over two thousand years of moral discourse about medicine, covering traditions in both the East and West. Jonsen's tour through time and cultures highlights particular events and persons, and shows that even though there are some cultural differences, common themes coalesce in a long tradition of the ethics of medicine."
Philosophy in Review