Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, the doctrine of informed consent has become a focal point in discussions of medical ethics. The literature of informed consent explores the evolution of the principle of autonomy, purportedly emerging from the mists of 19th Century medical practice, and finding its earliest articulation in legal cases where wronged citizens asserted their rights against medical authority. A commonplace, if not obligatory, feature of that literature is a reference to the case of Mary Schloendorff and the opinion (...) written by Judge Benjamin Cardozo by which the case is remembered. Commentators today applaud the prescience of Cardozo for an early articulation of what eventually would become bioethical orthodoxy concerning informed consent and its place as a bulwark of patient autonomy. They inevitably quote Cardozo's famous statement, “Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”. (shrink)

For nearly a century, and until very recently, the majority of U.S. states required a blood test for marriage license applicants. The tests identified people with conditions formerly designated as "venereal diseases," most importantly gonorrhea and syphilis. Those who tested positive were barred from civil marriage. Although the premarital testing requirement is no longer a feature of state law, numerous related enactments are common features of law in most states.The historical literature describing the rise and fall of laws prescribing marriage (...) restrictions related to VD has treated those enactments as public health measures, meant primarily to forestall the spread of disease to intimate partners. But laws to... (shrink)

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on through (...) the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons. (shrink)

L’ironie est une valeur esthétique, et donc affective, chez Stendhal. Les phénomènes affectifs varient en nature et en intensité. L’ironie implique une gamme complexe d’aspects et de degrés : elle peut être satirique, comique, tragique, nihiliste, paradoxale, etc. Stendhal s’éloigne à la fois de la satire tragique de Chateaubriand et de l’ironie romantique nihiliste. Il pratique, certes, la satire sociale ; le roman doit atteindre l’idéal de l’ opéra-bouffe, où le comique est « un mélange de gaieté et de tendresse (...) ». L’ironie cache enfin la pudeur de l’écrivain qui masque ainsi sa tendresse et sa sympathie pour les âmes sublimes de ses personnages majeurs. (shrink)

Patrizia Lombardo | : Stendhal et Musil sont les deux écrivains par excellence qui se sont interrogés sur le type de connaissance qui vient de la littérature. Avant Musil et comme Musil, Stendhal répond à cette question fondamentale en montrant que le roman offre une connaissance des émotions humaines et de leur lien avec les valeurs. Il s’agit à la fois de valeurs éthiques — les situations morales dans lesquelles se trouvent les personnages — et des valeurs esthétiques et proprement (...) littéraires — le tragique, le comique, le tragi-comique, le sublime, etc. Surtout, le roman n’est pas simple représentation du réel, mais aussi du possible. L’analyse de quelques phrases hypothétiques, conjectures et expériences de pensée dans Le Rouge et le Noir, confirme la thèse que la littérature propose une connaissance du possible à travers le travail de l’imagination. | : Stendhal and Musil are deeply concerned with the question of theknowledge value of literature. Like Musil and before him, Stendhalanswered this question by showing the potential of the novel :this literary form presents human emotions and their connection tovalues. The characters deal with various situations, therefore conveyethical values, while aesthetic values —such as the comic, thetragic, the tragic-comic, the sublime- emerge from the way in whichhuman actions and emotions are represented. All these values arebrought about by the style of Stendhal, which is both form and content,both ethical and aesthetic. The analysis of some hypotheticalsentences, conjectures and thought experiments in The Red and the Blackconfirms the thesis later endorsed by Musil, that literature allows forthe knowledge of the possible, thanks to the exercise of theimagination. (shrink)

During the 20th Century, thirty-two state legislatures passed laws that sanctioned coercive sexual sterilization as a solution to the purported detrimental increases in the population of “unfit” or “defective” citizens. While both scholarly and popular commentary has attempted to attribute these laws to political parties, or to broad or poorly defined ideological groups such as “progressives,” no one has identified the political allegiance of each legislator who introduced a successfully adopted sterilization law, and the governor who signed it. This article (...) remedies that omission. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and (...) from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

Kara Swanson details the professional evolution of Alan Guttmacher, and the quandary he faced when the law interfered with prerogatives he wished to exercise in his practice of reproductive medicine. This response focuses on how decoupling reproductive technologies from a regime requiring medical licensure could lead to more complete reproductive autonomy for women.

This article discusses irony as an aesthetic, therefore affective, value, as exemplified in Stendhal’s irony. Affective phenomena vary in nature and intensity, and one same emotion can be coloured differently (adjectives indicate its nuances, as, for example, in “sweet nostalgia” or “desperate nostalgia” etc.). Irony involves a very complex gamut of aspects and degrees: it can be satiric, comic, tragic, nihilistic, paradoxical etc. I first consider what kinds of irony Stendhal avoided. He discarded both the tragic satire of Chateaubriand and (...) Romantic nihilistic irony. Then I look at Stendhal’s theory of laughter, as hinted at in several of his writings where he reflects upon various forms of comedy while developing his own ideal of comedy as it will appear in his major novels (see Journal littéraire, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, Racine et Shakespeare, and Correspondance). Dissatisfied with Hobbes’ definition of laughter as involving a feeling of superiority, he considered two conditions for the comic effect: clarity and suddenness. Both become fundamental in his literary style. At the same time Stendhal was convinced of the affective superiority of the moderns over the Ancients: only the moderns, forged by Christian sensitivity, experienced tender emotions. Tenderness should color everything: the novel should aim at the ideal of opera-bouffe, where comedy is “a mixture of gaiety and tenderness,” while the writer masks his tenderness by using a “sweet” (douce) irony towards his favourite characters. (shrink)

Dr. Caleb Williams Saleeby was the author of Parenthood and Race Culture, one of the first monographs on eugenics and the book that popularized the term “racial poison.” The goal of eradicating the racial poisons and the harm they caused — particularly infant morbidity and mortality — provided common ground for early 20th century reformers, and their concerns fed the growing support for legal prohibition of alcohol.

The STD experiments in Guatemala from 1946–1948 have earned a place of infamy in the history of medical ethics. But if the Guatemala STD experiments were so “ethically impossible,” how did the U.S. government approve their funding? Although much of the literature has targeted the failings of Dr. John Cutler, we focus on the institutional context and research ethos that shaped the outcome of the research. After the end of WWII, Dr. Cassius Van Slyke reconstructed the federal research contracts process (...) into a grant program. The inaugural NIH study section recommended approval of the Guatemala STD experiments at its first meeting. The funding and oversight process of the Guatemala research was marked with serious conflicts of interest and a lack of oversight, and it was this structure, as opposed to merely a maleficent individual, that allowed the Guatemala STD experiments to proceed. We conclude that while current research regulations are designed to prevent the abuses perpetrated on the subjects of the Guatemala STD experiments, it takes a comprehensive understanding of research ethics through professional education to achieve the longstanding ideal of the responsible investigator, and ensure ethical research under any regulatory scheme. (shrink)

Since their revelation to the public, the sexually transmitted disease experiments in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 have earned a place of infamy in the history of medical ethics. During these experiments, Public Health Service researchers intentionally exposed over 1,300 non-consenting Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, psychiatric patients, and commercial sex workers to gonorrhea, syphilis, and/or chancroid under conditions that have shocked the medical community and public alike. Expert analysis has found little scientific value to the experiments as measured by current or (...) contemporaneous research standards.Such an obvious case of research malfeasance, which violated research norms in place both in the past and now, has been uniformly repudiated. The Guatemala STD experiments were labeled “clearly unethical” by President Barack Obama and “reprehensible” by the Secretaries of State and Health and Human Services. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and (...) from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and real life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on the engagement of law as a partner in health care innovation. The article addresses: the history and contents of recent United States federal law restricting the use of genetic information by insurers and employers; the recent federal policy recommending routine HIV testing; the recent revision of federal policy regarding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research; the history, current status, and need for future attention to advance directives; the (...) recent emergence of medical–legal partnerships and their benefits for patients; the obesity epidemic and its implications for the child’s right to health under international conventions. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on controversy at the intersection of health care law and culture. The article addresses: emerging issues in federal regulatory oversight of the rapidly developing market in direct-to-consumer genetic testing, including questions about the role of government oversight and professional mediation of consumer choice; continuing controversies surrounding stem cell research and therapies and the implications of these controversies for healthcare institutions; a controversy in India arising at the intersection of abortion law (...) and the rights of the disabled but implicating a broader set of cross-cultural issues; and the education of U.S. health care providers and lawyers in the theory and practice of cultural competency. (shrink)

In this personal narrative the author recounts his experiences teaching bioethics in Pakistan. He notes the different moral, cultural and legal environments of Pakistan as compared to the United States, and in particular, the ways in which subtle interpretations of Sharia law shape bioethical reflections as well as the biomedical legal environment. As he argues, any attempt to export models of bioethics from one country to another with no attention to social and cultural differences is a recipe for failure. To (...) presume that all ethical considerations are universal is to devalue moral traditions that differ from our own, and dismiss cultural values of other societies. (shrink)