The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics

This chapter chronicles the history and historiography of medical ethics through the end of the twentieth century, using a few noteworthy events in world and medical history as chronological signposts. Following Roy Porter, the chronology opens circa 4000 BCE: the dates of the earliest known urban centers. The dates, events, persons, and texts cited in the chronology are, for the most part, those mentioned in the book. The earliest medical entry is circa 650 BCE, a description of epilepsy in a Babylonian text; the Hippocratic corpus, several centuries younger, constitute the first texts cited. The chronology ends in 2000, closing with an act prohibiting cloning and a book by Albert Jonsen, on the history of medical ethics. For reasons of economy, and because of the difficulty of putting the present into historical perspective, the chapter restricted entries in the person's column to those who are deceased.