The Birth of Bioethics (Paperback)

~ Albert R. Jonsen (Author) "Bioethics did not begin with a Big Bang..." (more)
Key Phrases: early bioethicists, emerging bioethics, foregoing life support, New York, Paul Ramsey, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New England Journal of Medicine

The field of bioethics has grown enormously over the past few decades. Consequently, people entering the field may try to acquire knowledge about it as rapidly as possible by learning only about current consensus and controversies. By doing so, however, they may not learn that accepted or controversial views concerning bioethics can reflect the time and circumstances in which they arose. Without this awareness, they may not realize that some of those who helped forge bioethics did so at considerable personal sacrifice. And without this awareness, they may not anticipate what they, too, must do if they believe that their views should be heard and should prevail.

In The Birth of Bioethics Jonsen has written an in-depth review of bioethics, including a historical analysis of the field. But this is also a book about heroes.

Jonsen presents the growth of bioethics from 1947, when the Nuremberg Code was drawn up, to 1987. He does so in three chapters on the religious, philosophical, and governmental aspects of the subject. He covers five major areas of bioethics, including research and death and dying, and deals with bioethics as a discipline and as a topic of discourse. In the final chapter, he gives his explanation of why bioethics arose in this country.

The history he presents includes advanced ideas, such as H. Tristram Engelhardt's concept of ethics as an "enterprise in controversy resolution" and Robert Veatch's criticism of the assumption of moral authority by persons with technical competence or what he calls the "generalization of expertise." This material should inform even sophisticated readers. Comprehensive footnotes and illuminating cross-references reflect Jonsen's consummate knowledge of theology, philosophy, history, and literature. He cites Homer and Shakespeare, and he makes the history of bioethics come alive, because he was there.

For instance, I have taught bioethics to medical students for 20 years using a well-known film about a baby born at Johns Hopkins Hospital with Down's syndrome and an intestinal blockage requiring surgery. I learned only from this book that the chairperson of the pediatrics department at Johns Hopkins had had two children with developmental disabilities and that the person who portrayed the baby's doctor in this film had actually been an intern then and had felt a sense of moral outrage at the time.

Jonsen's depictions of the pioneers in bioethics whom he knew and worked with are vivid. Joseph Fletcher, for instance, stood in picket lines, and "turned to... bioethics because everything else was so vicious." Paul Ramsey had this to say about a conference held in the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma, California, to determine whether neonates with severe defects should ever be allowed to die: "The symbolism... should not be lost: a valley on a dead satellite of our mother earth." Warren Reich and George Kanoti, while they were nontenured professors at the Catholic University of America, expressed unpopular views that resulted in their being invited to resign. But Jonsen is with them: "It began to dawn on me that as a newly minted moral theologian, I would not be comfortable or conscientious teaching the traditional doctrine on abortion and contraception."

Jonsen's own beliefs, no doubt, influence which areas he chooses to emphasize. He pays particular attention to the influence of Catholic religious doctrine and of the theologians Joseph Fletcher, Richard McCormick, and Paul Ramsey. Yet Jonsen sees no major issue in American bioethics in which religious and philosophical ethics did not collaborate and sees this "trinity" of theologians as having presided over the birth of bioethics.

Jonsen's unique insights, infused by the compassion he obviously feels, recommend this book strongly. Jonsen's own words are compelling. In regard to choosing whether to allow neonates to die, he states, "The hope seems so great and the loss so devastating to parents that the decision... is particularly agonizing." About the rise of bioethics in the United States he says, "My hypothesis is that the American ethos is strongly tempted to endow various aspects of life with moral meaning in a capricious way." And, with respect to the new forms of technology that have been developed to help women bear children he states, "The difficulty of unraveling the ethics of reproductive technology may be due to our impoverished ability to recognize and appreciate what is normal about being human."

Reviewed by Edmund G. Howe, M.D., J.D.
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Bioethics, Albert Jonsen observes in the introduction to his important, highly personal, and readable book, did not begin with a bang. But what becomes very clear as one reads his recollections of the origins of the field, is that it did not begin with people prone to emit whimpers...Jonsen brings an elephantine memory and a deft pen to telling the story of what happened when the first theologians, philosophers, and physicians found themselves out on these ethical frontiers of medicine without much in the way of intellectual tools to help them."--Arthur Kaplan in The Journal of the American Medical Association
"Al Jonsen's warmth, humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of the American Bioethics scene are evident throughout, and, despite its size, the book rarely fails to be both informative and engaging." -Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy
"In The Birth of Bioethics Jonsen has written an in-depth review of bioethics, including a historical analysis of the field...This material should inform even sophisticated readers...Jonsen's depictions of the pioneers in bioethics whom he knew and worked with are vivid...Jonsen's unique insights, infused by the compassion he obviously feels, recommend this book strongly."--Edmund G. Howe in The New England Journal of Medicine
"A 'must-read' for all students of bioethics, on either side of the lectern, and for anyone interested in contemporary American culture."--Felicia Cohn in Religious Studies Review
"Albert Jonsen, a bioethics pioneer in his own right, is also a gifted writer of clear and arresting prose, a trait not widely found in bioethics circles. As part of a larger goal to evaluate the influence of the field of bioethics, Jonsen aims for "an accurate historical recounting of why and how the field came into being." The result is an intensely interesting history that will provoke many critical and constructive responses...it is a singular success..."--John C. Fletcher in Medical Humanities Review
"As a remarkable scholarly achievement, Professor Jonsen's book will be of interest to those in the field, as well as those concerned more generally to know what US bioethics is, where it was, and where it might be going." --Associated Medical Services
"This book is a narrative of the emergence of Bioethics in the United States in the period 1947 to 1987, written by one of the pioneers and major scholars in the field...this lengthy volume is rightly seen as the magnum opus of a single author, and it bears his distinctive stamp. Al Jonsen's warmth, humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of the American Bioethics scene are evident throughout, and despite its size, the book rarely fails to be both informative and engaging. It surely must be read by anyone interested in the transformation of traditional medical ethics in the last half of this century into the wide-ranging, multidisciplinary enterprise of Bioethics."--Alastair V. Campbell in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (August 28, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195171470
• ISBN-13: 978-0195171471
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #685,283 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bioethic's "Birth": Jonsen Must Be Read, June 4, 2000

By	DNI "dnirving" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Birth of Bioethics (Hardcover)

Dr. Albert Jonsen's book, THE BIRTH OF BIOETHICS, is extraordinary for its historical sweep and accurate documentation of the new field of bioethics. It is a wealth of facts about this new field, some inaccessible to many, written by one of the original Founders of the field. Of particular interest is his historical documentation of bioethics' formal birth by a Congressional mandate in the National Research Act 1974. This Act called for the appointment of a governmental National Commission, one of whose mandates was to identify the "ethical" principles that the federal government should use in the use of human subjects in research. The 11-member National Commission's Belmont Report (1979) did just that, articulating formally for the first time the bioethics principles of autonomy, justice and beneficence. As a First Generationer in this new field, I very much enjoyed Dr. Jonsen's filling in the names, dates, places, etc., of the birth of this new academic field - now internationally applied - which I went on to study. Chunk full of documentation.