Medicine and Morality

Medicine and Morality

Author: Helen Kang

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0774862157

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Medical professionals are expected to act in the interest of patients, the public, and the pursuit of medical knowledge. Their disinterested stance gives them credibility and authority. But what happens when doctors’ supposed impartiality comes under fire? In Medicine and Morality, Helen Kang examines three moments in the history of the medical profession in Canada, spanning more than 150 years, when doctors’ moral and scientific authority was questioned. She shows that, in these moments of crisis, the profession was compelled to re-examine its priorities, strategize in order to regain credibility, and redefine what it means to be a good doctor. Medicine and Morality reveals that professional medicine defines integrity, objectivity, accountability, neutrality, and other ideals according to its social, political, historical, and economic struggles with the state, the media, and even the public. In other words, moral and scientific standards in medicine are determined in direct relation to, not in spite of, conflict of interest.


When Good Drugs Go Bad

When Good Drugs Go Bad

Author: Dan Malleck

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2015-07-15

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0774829222

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Throughout the 1800s, opium and cocaine could be easily obtained to treat a range of ailments in Canada. Dependency, when it occurred, was considered a matter of personal vice. Near the end of the century, attitudes shifted and access to drugs became more restricted. How did this happen? Dan Malleck examines the conditions that led to Canada’s current drug laws. Drawing on newspaper accounts, medical and pharmacy journals, professional association files, asylum documents, physicians’ case books, and pharmacy records, Malleck demonstrates how a number of social, economic, and cultural forces converged in the early 1900s to influence lawmakers and criminalize addiction. His research exposes how social concerns about drug addiction had less to do with the long pipe and shadowy den than with lobbying by medical professionals, a growing pharmaceutical industry, and concern about the morality and future of the nation.


Andrew Fernando Holmes

Andrew Fernando Holmes

Author: Richard W. Vaudry

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1487502192

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Physician, surgeon, natural historian, educator, Protestant evangelical. Andrew Fernando Holmes's name is synonymous with the McGill medical faculty and with the discovery of a congenital heart malformation known as the "Holmes heart." He also played a critical role in the creation of a scientific culture in early-nineteenth-century Montreal. Born in captivity at Cadiz, Spain, Holmes immigrated to Lower Canada in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He arrived in a province that was experiencing profound social, economic, and cultural change as the result of a long process of integration into the British Atlantic world. A transatlantic perspective, therefore, undergirds this biography, from an exploration of how Holmes's family members were participants in an Atlantic world of trade and consumption, to explaining how his educational experiences at Edinburgh and Paris informed his approach to the practice of medicine, medical education, and medical politics. This fascinating biography also examines Holmes's deepest religious convictions, positioning them at the centre of his work and life.