The teaching of medical ethics in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Abstract

Eduard Seidler sets his discussion of the teaching of medical ethics in the Federal Republic of Germany against an historical background. Immediately after the Second World War the freshness of the memory of the 'Nuremberg Medical Trials' influenced the way in which moral dilemmas were treated in Germany. At the present time no systematic instruction in medical ethics is provided in either undergraduate or postgraduate or continuing medical education. As a result of this, an inquiry was set up in 1977/78. Questionnaires were sent out with a view to collecting information on how subjects referring to medical ethics are treated during medical training. The inquiry showed that no special discipline can claim to be the only competent one for medical ethics, but that everyone has something to contribute. Dr Seidler concludes by stating that basic curricula related to the problems of medical ethics would have to be developed and should be carried on continuously within the training programme.

Letter from Germany.

“…The discipline is taught by professors of medicine trained in psychiatry, history of medicine or the basic sciences, as well as by professors of theology. Philosophers, ethicists or socio-culturalists devoted to medical ethics are practically unheard of (38). Only very few periodicals are open to medicoethical themes and most of them are printed by publishing houses with strong religious affiliations or directly connected to the medical establishment.…”

Teaching medical ethics in other countries.

“…Up to 1979 there was no systematic teaching ofethics at the undergraduate or graduate level, or in continuing education (13). Even the old tradition of teaching by example was in difficulties because of the excessive number of students, insufficient opportunities for clinical experience, a lack of bedside oral presentations, and a tightly packed six-year dictated curriculum.…”

Shared Principles? German Responses to American Bioethics Since the 1970s

“…35 Such a lack of international representation becomes all the more conspicuous considering the factual abundance of contacts between Germans and American bioethicists, which are not least visible through German contributionsmostly about the admittedly slow and frustrating development of ethics in German medicinein the discipline's journals. 36 In fact, such personal transatlantic contacts had been established in the field as early as 1981 when German philosopher Hans-Martin Sass from the University of Bochum came to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, one of the first bioethical institutions founded ten years earlier. Sass started his lasting relationship with the Kennedy Institute as a visiting scholar to conduct research on the development of professional ethics in the United States with a special focus on bioethics, funded by the VW Foundation (Stiftung Volkswagenwerk).…”