Thomas Percival’s Medical Ethics and the Invention of Medical Professionalism (eBook)

This book provides the first comprehensive, historically based, philosophical interpretations of two texts of Thomas Percival's professional ethics in medicine set in the context of his intellectual biography. Preceded by his privately published and circulated Medical Jurisprudence of 1794, Thomas Percival (1740-1804) published Medical Ethics in 1803, the first book thus titled in the global histories of medicine and medical ethics.  From his days as a student at the Warrington Academy and the medical schools of the universities of Edinburgh and Leyden, Percival steeped himself in the scientific method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).  McCullough shows how Percival became a Baconian moral scientist committed to Baconian deism and Dissent.  Percival also drew on and significantly expanded the work of his predecessor in professional ethics in medicine, John Gregory (1724-1773).  The result is that Percival should be credited with co-inventing professionalism in medicine with Gregory.  To aid and encourage future scholarship, this book brings together the first time three essential Percival texts, Medical Jurisprudence, Medical Ethics, and Extracts from the Medical Ethics of Dr. Percival of 1823, the bridge from Medical Ethics to the 1847 Code of Medical Ethics on the American Medical Association.  To support comparative reading, this book provides concordances of Medical Jurisprudence to Medical Ethics and of Medical Ethics to Extracts.  Finally, this book includes the first Chronology of Percival's life and works.  

Laurence B. McCullough has been a philosopher-medical educator for four decades.  He has taught and published in ethics of aging, medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, paediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery.  From the beginning of his academic career he has been an historian of medical ethics.  His books on the history of medical ethics include John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine (Kluwer 1998), John Gregory's Writings on Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine (as editor, Kluwer 1998), and The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (as co-editor with Robert B. Baker, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

 After receiving his AB in Art History from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.  After a post-doctoral fellowship at The Hastings Center (then in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York) he joined the medical and philosophy faculties at Texas A&M University.  He then served on the medical faculty at Georgetown University and as a Senior Research

Scholar the Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics.  He joined the faculty of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in 1988 and become the inaugural holder of Baylor's Dalton Tomlin Chair in Medical Ethics and Health Policy in 2008.