The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong (Rhetoric & Public Affairs)

__The Origins of Bioethics__ argues that what we remember from the history of medicine and how we remember it are consequential for the identities of doctors, researchers, and patients in the present day. Remembering when medicine went wrong calls people to account for the injustices inflicted on vulnerable communities across the twentieth century in the name of medicine, but the very groups empowered to create memorials to these events often have a vested interest in minimizing their culpability for them. Sometimes these groups bury this past and forget events when medical research harmed those it was supposed to help. The call to bioethical memory then conflicts with a desire for “minimal remembrance” on the part of institutions and governments. __The Origins of Bioethics__ charts this tension between bioethical memory and minimal remembrance across three cases—the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Whole Body Radiation Study—that highlight the shift from robust bioethical memory to minimal remembrance to forgetting. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1. Theory and History of Bioethical Memory Chapter 1. Bioethical Memory and Minimal Remembrance Chapter 2. Experiment or Treatment? Histories of Medical Care, Research, and Regulation Part 2. Cases of Bioethical Memory and Minimal Remembrance Chapter 3. Lawsuits and Legacies: Competing Memorializations of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Chapter 4. Minimal Remembrance and the Obligation to Remember: Official and Vernacular Memories of the Willowbrook State School Chapter 5. Attempting to Forget: The University of Cincinnati Radiation Studies Conclusion Notes References Index "In this book, author John Lynch shows how three controversial experiments--the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Study, and the Cincinnati Total Body Irradiation Study--have been remembered and forgotten, and why their memorialization or their erasure matters today"-- Provided by publisher