The international growth and influence of bioethics has led some to identify it as a decisive shift in the location and exercise of 'biopower'. This book provides an in-depth study of how philosophers, lawyers and other 'outsiders' came to play a major role in discussing and helping to regulate issues that used to be left to doctors and scientists. It discusses how club regulation stemmed not only from the professionalising tactics of doctors and scientists, but was compounded by the 'hands-off' approach of politicians and professionals in fields such as law, philosophy and theology. The book outlines how theologians such as Ian Ramsey argued that 'transdisciplinary groups' were needed to meet the challenges posed by secular and increasingly pluralistic societies. It also examines their links with influential figures in the early history of American bioethics. The book centres on the work of the academic lawyer Ian Kennedy, who was the most high-profile advocate of the approach he explicitly termed 'bioethics'. It shows how Mary Warnock echoed governmental calls for external oversight. Many clinicians and researchers supported her calls for a 'monitoring body' to scrutinise in vitro fertilisation and embryo research. The growth of bioethics in British universities occurred in the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of dedicated centres for bioethics. The book details how some senior doctors and bioethicists led calls for a politically-funded national bioethics committee during the 1980s. It details how recent debates on assisted dying highlight the authority and influence of British bioethicists.
Balancing the self
SOCIAL HISTORIES OF MEDICINE
Series editors:
, andSocial Histories of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, illness and medicine, from prehistory to the present, in every part of the world. The series covers the circumstances that promote health or illness, the ways in which people experience and explain such conditions and what, practically, they do about them. Practitioners of all approaches to health and healing come within its scope, as do their ideas, beliefs and practices, and the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they operate. Methodologically, the series welcomes relevant studies in social, economic, cultural and intellectual history, as well as approaches derived from other disciplines in the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities. The series is a collaboration between Manchester University Press and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
Previously published
The metamorphosis of autism
Payment and philanthropy in British healthcare, 1918–48
The politics of vaccination Edited by , and
Leprosy and colonialism
Medical misadventure in an age of professionalisation, 1780–1890
Conserving health in early modern culture Edited by and
Migrant architects of the NHS
Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914 Edited by and
Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor, 1750–1834
Medical societies and scientific culture in nineteenth-century Belgium
Managing diabetes, managing medicine
Vaccinating Britain
Madness on trial
Early Modern Ireland and the world of medicine Edited by
Feeling the strain
Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture
Communicating the history of medicine Edited by and
Progress and pathology Edited by , and
Balancing the self
Medicine, politics and the regulation of health in the twentieth century
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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ISBN 978 1 5261 3213 0 hardback
ISBN 978 1 5261 3212 3 open access
First published 2020
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