This book provides the first comprehensive, historically based, philosophical interpretations of two texts of Thomas Percival's professional ethics in medicine set in the context of his intellectual biography. Preceded by his privately published and circulated
Medical Jurisprudence of 1794, Thomas Percival (1740-1804) published
Medical Ethics in 1803, the first book thus titled in the global histories of medicine and medical ethics. From his days as a student at the Warrington Academy and the medical schools of the universities of Edinburgh and Leyden, Percival steeped himself in the scientific method of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). McCullough shows how Percival became a Baconian moral scientist committed to Baconian deism and Dissent. Percival also drew on and significantly expanded the work of his predecessor in professional ethics in medicine, John Gregory (1724-1773). The result is that Percival should be credited with co-inventing professionalism in medicine with Gregory. To aid and encourage future scholarship, this book brings together the first time three essential Percival texts,
Medical Jurisprudence,
Medical Ethics, and
Extracts from the Medical Ethics of Dr. Percival of 1823, the bridge from
Medical Ethics to the 1847
Code of Medical Ethics on the American Medical Association. To support comparative reading, this book provides concordances of
Medical Jurisprudence to
Medical Ethics and of
Medical Ethics to
Extracts. Finally, this book includes the first Chronology of Percival's life and works.
Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics and the Invention of Medical Professionalism: With Three Key Percival Texts, Two Concordances, and a Chronology
Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Part I: Thomas Percival's
Medical Ethics and the Invention of.- Medical Professionalism.- Chapter 1: What Percival Inherits: John Gregory's Moral Revolution against the Long Tradition of Entrepreneurial Medicine in the History of Western Medicine.- Chapter 2.- An Intellectual Biography of Thomas Percival.- Chapter 3: Thomas Percival Joins Gregory's Moral Revolution against the Long Tradition of Entrepreneurial Medicine in the History of Western Medicine.- Chapter 4: The Place of Percival's
Medical Ethics in the History of Medical Ethics.- Bibliography.- Part II: Three Key Percival Texts -
Medical Ethics,
Medical Jurisprudence, and
Extracts - Two Concordances, and a Chronology.- Three Texts.- Concordance of
Medical Jurisprudence with
Medical Ethics.- Concordance of
Medical Ethics with the
Extracts.- Chronology of Thomas Percival's Life and Works.- Index.