メディカル・ヒューマニティーズ教育におけるバイオエシックスの理念 : 米国の医学教育をめぐって

抄録

From the late 1960s, arguments concerning ethical problems in clinical applications and experiments of life sciences and biomedical sciences began in the United States. They caused the birth of a new discipline, bioethics. This situation influenced American medical education and showed various difficulties in the traditional ways of training physicians in professional ethics. American medical schools had to make new educational programs, that is, medical humanities, whereby students would have special courses in human values. The purpose of this paper is to consider historically the connection between the bioethics movement and the development of humanistic medical education in the United States and to make clear the influence of bioethical ideas in medical humanities. The author concludes that the medical humanities program is based on the ideas of bioethics. One of these is that a patient's autonomy has to be respected in medicine. Another is that we must participate in interdisciplinary discussions in order to make correct decisions in ethical problems of life sciences and medicine. The necessity of humanistic medical education in Japanese medical schools is also discussed.