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Susan E. Lederer, Before Bioethics: A History of American Medical Ethics from the Colonial Period to the Bioethics Revolution, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 70, Issue 2, April 2015, Pages 322–324, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jru031
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This is an important book. The first history of American medical ethics since Donald Konold's 1962 volume, A History of American Medical Ethics, 1847–1912, Baker's book represents a major contribution to a much neglected historiography, for despite the ubiquity of bioethics in contemporary media and in medical schools, there has been surprisingly scant attention to the histories of medical ethics and bioethics in the United States. As philosopher-historian Robert Baker argues, the history of medical ethics in America matters for several compelling reasons; it not only illuminates the advent of bioethics (a term first used in print in 1970), but it also continues to inform moral sensibilities and intuitions of physicians as professionals.
The book's scope is expansive, covering practices of medical ethics and medical morality in the colonial period through the 1970s when bioethics flourished in institutes and medical schools, and bioethicists served on government commissions. So too is Baker's approach. Whereas Konold focused almost entirely on medical societies and physicians, Baker extends his analysis to encompass medical luminaries such as Benjamin Rush and Worthington Hooker, as well as individuals who rarely, if ever, appear in histories of medical ethics. For example, Baker analyzes the role that midwives played in policing the morality of the birthing chamber. In colonial Massachusetts and New York, midwives swore an oath to be ready and diligent to help any woman in labor, to prevent any deliberate harm to a newborn, and to forestall any woman from pretending to be delivered of a child when she had not given birth. Such oaths, he contends, were the oldest documented evidence of European medical ethics in the colonies. The precepts in the midwife's oath became law in Puritan Massachusetts in 1696, and were invoked to convict Rebekah Chamblit, a young woman, unmarried and delivered of an out-of-wedlock child, who was executed in 1733 for hiding the dead body of her infant. Midwives' oaths, and their sophisticated and articulate discussion of fiduciary responsibility, lost currency as female midwifes were replaced by male physicians, whose oaths said virtually nothing about fidelity to patients and responsibility to provide care regardless of ability to pay.
