Ethics and medical practice : some considerations

Abstract

In The Laws Plato wrote about relationships between physicians and patients. Slaves, he said, are paid a hurried visit, received in dispensaries, given no account of their complaint and asked for none of their own. The physician gives the slave 'some empirical injunction with an air of finished knowledge, and then is off in hot haste to the next ailing servant'. The free man's disease, on the contrary, he treats by going into it thoroughly in a 'scientific' way, taking the patient and his family into his confidence, learning from the sufferer, gaining his support, and gradually conducting him towards a complete restoration of his health. The distinction Plato made, in brief, is one between regarding the patient as a person, a moral equal and a possessor of rights, and regarding him as an object, a moral inferior, and one entitled to no rights at all. Our twentieth century culture and its moral sensibilities obviously do not permit these double standards. Morally, we can regard patients, whoever they are, only in one way, as 'free men', although they are not always treated as such. The ethics of medical practice, therefore, concerns the treatment of 'free men', or, as I shall continue to call them, moral persons.