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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.
The course
may be of particular interest to those considering entering health
care professions, and of more general interest to those interested
in value questions surrounding medical practices, biomedical research,
public health, and human rights.
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
- Beauchamp & Steinbock, New
Ethics for the Public's Health, Oxford Univ 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
- online mini-lectures,
etc.
Some
topics
- 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
- Issues related
to bioterrorism
- Exploration of
the conflicts and synergies in the effort to protect both the 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.
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