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Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College
Introduction
to Bioethics
Dr Tom Kerns North
Seattle Community College
This introductory
Bioethics course deals with ethical questions surrounding clinical medical
practice, with ethical issues entailed by biomedical research, and with
more general ethical questions about the maintenance and improvement of
the health and well-being of communities on both the local and global levels.
Required
reading for the course includes:
- Lisa Belkin, First
Do No Harm, Fawcett Books
- Freeman & McDonnell, Tough
Decisions: Cases in Medical Ethics, Oxford University Press
- David Feldshuh, Miss
Evers' Boys, Dramatists Play Service Inc
- Kerns, Environmentally
Induced Illnesses: Ethics, Risk Assessment and Human Rights, McFarland
- Kerns, Jenner on
Trial: The Ethics of Vaccine Research in the Age of Smallpox and the
Age of AIDS, University Press of America (full text available
free on the web)
- Henrik Ibsen (Arthur
Miller adaptation), Enemy of the People, Viking Press
- The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, The Nuremberg Code, The World Health
Organization's International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical
Research Involving Human Subjects, and several other articles
and documents that will be made available online
Some topics
the course explores:
- Introduction to basic
concepts in human health and disease, including some basic human biology,
the elements of communicable disease, the fundamentals of environmentally
and occupationally induced illness
- Case studies of clinical
and research ethical questions (including a possible online visit by
Dr Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine in 1796)
- Introduction to the
fundamentals of ethical decision-making, including teleological, deontological,
characterological, etc foundations of ethical thinking
- Detailed case studies
in current medical-ethical decision-making, e.g., in "newly emerging" infectious
diseases such as HIV/AIDS, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, etc
- Examination of ethical
issues surrounding environmentally induced illnesses such as cancers,
chemical sensitivity disorders, and asthma and other respiratory diseases
- The conflicts
and synergies in the effort to protect both public health and human
rights
- Exploration of some
historical analogs for today’s newly emerging epidemics, such as
the Black Death, the Plague of Athens, Smallpox epidemics, Cholera epidemics,
etc.
Business
stuff
Course
materials
Lectures and discussion
questions
Research
resources
Dictionaries
Books
available in full-text on the web
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