Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics

by Stevens, M. L. Tina

• ISBN13: 9780801874482
• ISBN10: 0801874483
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-07-01
• Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS

Summary

In Bioethics in America, Tina Stevens challenges the view that the origins of the bioethics movement can be found in the 1960s, a decade mounting challenges to all variety of authority. Instead, Stevens sees bioethics as one more product of a "centuries-long cultural legacy of American ambivalence toward progress," and she finds its modern roots in the responsible science movement that emerged following detonation of the atomic bomb. Rather than challenging authority, she says, the bioethics movement was an aid to authority, in that it allowed medical doctors and researchers to proceed on course while bioethicists managed public fears about medicine's new technologies. That is, the public was reassured by bioethical oversight of biomedicine; in reality, however, bioethicists belonged to the same mainstream that produced the doctors and researchers whom the bioethicists were guiding.

Author Biography

M. L. Tina Stevens teaches in the History Department at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Tradition of Ambivalence

The Culture of Post-atomic Ambivalence

""Leaders of Leaders"": The Hastings Center, 1969 to the Present

Redefining Death in America, 1968

""Sleeping Beauty"": Karen Ann Quinlan and the Rise of Bioethics in America

Epilogue

Conclusion and Outlook

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