Abstract
There is a somewhat nebulous and elusive quality usually desired and sometimes present in medical practice, variously called caring, compassion, humanitarianism, altruism, beneficence, or philanthropy. None of these words individually is adequate to encompass the quality to which this historical investigation is addressed, and none is truly synonymous with any other. Each of these words can be taken as having a negative connotation in that each assumes, as it were, even if only slightly, a need or a deficiency in someone to which the quality expressed by the word is, at least in part, a response. As one reads through this list of words, that negative connotation grows in intensity until, when one reaches ‘philanthropy’, one is dealing with a term that has of late, when applied to medical practice, received some rather ‘bad press’. This is especially evident in articles by William F. May [31] and Robert M. Veatch [45], both of whom are concerned with some fundamental questions of the basis for medical ethics and obligations within the physician/patient relationship. Both stress the desirability of obligations founded on reciprocity rather than on deontology that arises from the profession’s own definition of its role-specific duties. Both authors consider philanthropy as a central feature of the latter, that is, of a one-sided definition of obligations. May writes about “the conceit of philanthropy when it is assumed that the professional’s commitment to his fellow man is a gratuitous, rather than a responsive or reciprocal, act. Statements of medical ethics that obscure the doctor’s prior indebtedness to the community are tainted with the odor of condescension” ([31], p. 31). There is a degree of condescension, or at least a potential for suspicion of condescension, in each of the words listed above, indeed in that very quality in medical practice for which we are at a loss to find a suitable word. In the present paper we shall avoid being prescriptive as we seek to describe that elusive element in the history of ancient and medieval medicine.
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© 1982 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Amundsen, D.W., Ferngren, G.B. (1982). Philanthropy in Medicine: Some Historical Perspectives. In: Shelp, E.E. (eds) Beneficence and Health Care. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7769-3_1
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