From its beginnings, Christianity has encouraged and provided health care, an activity featured in Jesus' healing and in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Over the centuries Christian traditions have also provided guidance for physicians, other health care providers, familial caregivers and patients. While often distinctive, this guidance sometimes overlapped with or incorporated, with modifications, guidance in professional oaths and codes. 'Medical ethics', which was largely physician ethics until nursing emerged in the nineteenth century, was subsumed in the 1960s and 70s under 'bioethics' or 'biomedical ethics', a broader conception for new developments and a variety of felt problems in biomedicine. For instance, medical technologies could prolong life far beyond previous possibilities, transplant organs from one living or dead person to another, detect certain fetal defects in utero and offer new reproductive opportunities. Bioethics or biomedical ethics involves an interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to ethical issues in the life sciences, medicine and health care.