Professors Baker and McCullough describe their experience
writing their book, The Cambridge World
History of Medical Ethics in an article published in CHAUSA’s Health Progress journal; March-April,
Vol. 90, Number 2
The Travails
and Triumphs of Publishing the First Global History of Medical Ethics
The Cambridge
World History of Medical Ethics Examines the Evolution of Medical Ethics from
the 12th Century to Today
BY ROBERT B.
BAKER, Ph.D., & LAURENCE B. McCULLOUGH, Ph.D.
Dr. Baker is
director of the bioethics program at Union Graduate College-Mount Sinai School
of Medicine and the William D. Williams Professor of Philosophy at Union
College, Schenectady, N.Y., and Dr. McCullough is chairman, Medical Ethics and
Health Policy at the Center for Medical Ethicsand Health Policy, Baylor College
of Medicine, Houston.
It's a large authoritative-looking green
book with gold lettering on the cover and spine, about the size of standard
piece of stationary but as thick as phone book. Weighing in at around 4 pounds,
it took a team of two editors working with 56 authors from 20 countries during
the course of 12 years to write the 63 chapters that fill the 876 dual-column
encyclopedia-like pages that make up The Cambridge
World History of Medical Ethics.
One of the first things readers will find in
the book is a 77-page "Chronology of Medical Ethics." As historians,
we sought to offer clinicians, bioethicists—everyone, in fact—a sense of
historical context in which events occurred, texts were written and policies
implemented. The Chronology, with its multi-column representation of events,
people, texts and policies graphically presents this context, showing as well
as telling what happened when.
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