Discovering the Individual

Abstract

To make this tension constructive, the ethicist and clinician should share something of each other's language and method while preserving the identity of their own discipline. If teachers of ethics should be at the bedside for the benefit of medical students, students of philosophy should be there also. In a unique program at the University of Tennessee, graduate students of philosophy spend an intensive residency in the hospital, the better to ground their cogitations in the moment of clinical truth.A variety of methods are now being used to ground medical ethics more firmly in the moment of clinical truth-ethical grand rounds, bedside rounds, ethical committees, and prob¬ lem-oriented seminars. To be salubrious for medicine and philosophy, they must avoid the double dangers of overidentification and of alienation of the two disciplines.If these dangers are obviated, the most important outcome will be physicians and ethicists of the future better equipped to assist patients and their families to exert their own moral agency. This would move medicine to a more sophisticated and more mature patient-physician relationship than at any time in its distinguished history.