Extensive historical sleuthing reveals that the word "bioethics" and the field of study it names experienced, in 1970/1971, a "bilocated birth" in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Washington, D.C. Van Rensselaer Potter, at the University of Wisconsin first coined the term; and André Hellegers, at Georgetown University, at the very least, latched onto the already-existing word "bioethics" and first used it in an institutional way to designate the focused area of inquiry that became an academic field of learning and a movement (...) regarding public policy and the life sciences. A further comparison of the Potter and the Hellegers/Georgetown understandings of bioethics and the relative acceptance of the two views will appear in the March 1995 issue of this journal. (shrink)

An article by Warren Reich in the December 1994 issue of this journal concludes that the word "bioethics" and the field of study it names experienced a "bilocated birth" in 1970/1971 under Van Rensselaer Potter, at the University of Wisconsin, and André Hellegers, at Georgetown University. Further historical inquiry confirms (1) that there were, from the start, some major differences—even clashes—between the Potter and the Hellegers/Georgetown understandings of bioethics; and (2) that the Hellegers/Georgetown approach came to be the more widely (...) accepted meaning of the term, while Potter's idea of bioethics remained largely marginalized. However, this inquiry also results in a third, unanticipated, conclusion: that Hellegers (in contrast to the dominant model offered by the Georgetown scholars) actually proposed a global approach to bioethics, bringing his vision much closer to Potter's evolving view than previously has been acknowledged. (shrink)

(2001). The Care-Based Ethic of Nazi Medicine and the Moral Importance of What We Care About. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 64-74.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The “Wider View”: André Hellegers’s Passionate, Integrating Intellect and the Creation of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich* (bio)AbstractThis article provides an account of how André Hellegers, founder and first Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, laid medicine open to bioethics. Hellegers’s approach to bioethics, as to morality generally and also to medicine and biomedical science, involved taking the “wider view”—a value-filled vision that integrated and gave meaning (...) to what otherwise was disparate, precarious, and conflicting. This article shows how Hellegers’s wider view of bioethics was shaped by events in his own life, his resultant sense of the precariousness of life and health, his commitment to religious inclusiveness, his research in fetal medicine, his clinical experience in obstetrics, his role in the struggle to change the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on fertility control, and his developing concepts of health and disease. Hellegers was committed to and worked toward bioethics as a self-consciously interdisciplinary field in which the contributing disciplines adapt to each other—rather than sustain themselves as autonomous disciplines—to create a dynamic and complex intellectual, clinical, and social activity.André Hellegers’s personality and life were like that of a meteor: brief appearance on the scene; high-speed, flaming trajectory; quick burn-out; its smallest residue worth examining for ages to come. You had to watch carefully, for otherwise you might miss what he was about—what he was really about. He had an unusually probing and unflagging mind, coupled with the ability to make people think; and in a very real sense, that is what he was always about. André was an extremely effective communicator. He was like Fred Astaire: he had flair and charm, and no matter how crowded the room, you instantly knew when he entered it. Like Astaire, he had a deep intensity and striving for perfection while making his art always look like great fun. He was an engaging [End Page 25] story-teller who also knew how to stun intelligent people with his insightful, often ironic and humorous thinking that got to the bottom of things very quickly, leaving his interlocutors with a huge agenda for further reflection. Yet in spite of all this alluring talent, André never attracted attention to himself in a vain way. Even as raconteur, he was always working, getting people to think and talk.There were three great passions in Hellegers’s life that enabled him to inspire and shape bioethics as he did. He had a passionate intellect that was constantly probing for new clarity at new levels of understanding and values, and he had the ability to infect other people with his intellectual passion. André Hellegers was deeply rooted in a Catholicism scarcely imaginable in the United States—an open, historically-conscious, northern European faith that kept him free of ideology while providing him a foundation on which he built a rich ecumenicity of theological and philosophical bioethics. Finally, and perhaps most decisively for his founding work in bioethics, Hellegers pushed and probed to get a world that was almost totally unaccustomed to communicating over disciplinary lines (incredibly, virtually no interdisciplinary conferences had taken place before his day) to dialogue and collaborate across the barriers of medicine, politics, and religion.IntroductionThe customary way of writing a history of someone’s involvement in the origins of something—say, the origins of a nation or, I suppose, the origins of bioethics—certainly would not customarily start with the foregoing type of vignette. It would have as its purpose to discuss such things as issues, events that raised issues, methods pursued and applied, and outcomes achieved. However, in this modest account of some of the major contributions of the late André E. Hellegers, M.D., to the development of the field of bioethics, I intend to focus on a different level of historical inquiry, one that portrays and explains the person, his world-view, and his motivation, as well as the cultural forces and events that conspired to make Hellegers and the people with whom he came into contact vibrant with a sense of innovative and creative—not to mention urgent—inquiry. I believe that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Revisiting the Launching of the Kennedy Institute: Re-visioning the Origins of BioethicsWarren Thomas Reich (bio)Twenty-five years ago, on October 1, 1971, at a press conference held at Georgetown University, the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics, later called the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, was officially inaugurated. To revisit that event—and the Institute’s five founding collaborators who spoke at it—provides an opportunity to (...) re-vision some of the most significant intellectual, moral, cultural, and political factors that shaped both this Institute and the then-nascent field of bioethics.Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who spoke at the press conference, was intensely committed to a new sort of philanthropy that would effect socio-political change in favor the dignity and well-being of the mentally disadvantaged. As executive vice-president of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, she had already applied the Foundation’s vision and resources to the task of harnessing the best of the “biological revolution” of the 1960s to prevent developmental disorders. Prompted by the values at stake in the care of the disadvantaged, she turned the Foundation toward the creation of the Institute in 1971.Just prior to the opening of the Institute, Mrs. Shriver had produced and appeared as introducer in a highly influential film, “Who Shall Survive?”, which dealt with a “mongoloid baby” who was allowed to die in the newborn clinic because of its condition. Showcased at a highly publicized symposium involving 2000 people (Editorial 1971) and widely discussed in the press, the film helped to establish neonatal ethics as paradigmatic for the emerging field of bioethics (Bedeviling Question 1971; Rothman 1991, pp. 190–221). Undoubtedly under the influence of her involvement in the publicizing of those issues, Mrs. Shriver commented at the press conference that she hoped the Institute would re-emphasize the value of children in face of the widespread feeling that children are a burden (Kennedys 1971, p. 19).At the press conference, then president of Georgetown University, Robert J. Henle, S.J., announced the Kennedy Foundation’s grant of $1.35 million to establish the Institute. Henle was undoubtedly alert to the fact that certain issues, such as abortion and terminating the lives of infants, would be perceived [End Page 323] as highly controversial when raised at a Catholic university. Not surprisingly, reporters at the press conference raised provocative questions about how Georgetown University would reconcile Catholic moral doctrine with the Institute’s broadly-based inquiries. Henle replied tersely that the Institute “will be a ‘truly ecumenical and catholic effort,’ defining catholic in its classical meaning of universal” (Helping 1971). The reporters might have found it quite ironic that within a few years Georgetown’s ecumenical vision had provided the intellectual environment that permitted the Institute to become famous for development of the first systematic, secular (principle-based) approach to bioethics (Reich 1995).Father Henle was probably also aware that by launching the Kennedy Institute he was creating the first institute principally devoted to ethics research ever established at a university. It took a special sort of university to take this first step into bioethics research and policymaking. In 1971, ethics was regarded as belonging to religion, and religion was generally regarded as suspect academically. While it was difficult, in that atmosphere, for a nonreligious university to take such a bold step, Henle’s Georgetown University offered a promising setting that could scarcely have been found in any other university. It departed from the common mold of Catholic-college-as-indoctrination-center, yet it had an explicit and unashamed commitment to the investigation of religious and secular values in an environment of academic freedom. It was an increasingly cosmopolitan university, committed to developing the best of secular scholarship. Furthermore, Henle was willing to experiment with as-yet unproven interdisciplinary studies.Sargent Shriver—god-father of the Kennedy Institute, chairman of its first Advisory Board, and a constant dialogue partner of his friend and the Institute’s founding director, Dr. André Hellegers—was intensely interested in linking scientific progress with religious belief, unfettered moral debate, and commitment to disadvantaged humans.At the inaugural event, the new Institute was described as... (shrink)

A historical understanding of the virtue of consolation, as contrasted to empathy, compassion, or sympathy, is developed. Recent findings from neuroscience are presented which support and affirm this understanding. These findings are related to palliative care and its current practice in bioethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Laying Medicine Open: Innovative Interaction Between Medicine and the HumanitiesLaurence B. McCullough and Warren Thomas ReichThe past three decades have witnessed the emergence and remarkable success of the fields of bioethics and medical humanities. The intellectual landscape of medicine and that of the humanities have been remarkably altered in the process. Twenty-five to 30 years ago in the United States there existed but a few courses in what came (...) to be called “bioethics” in departments of philosophy, religious studies, and theology in colleges and universities, a handful of programs of teaching in medical schools such as the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine at Hershey, and but one independent research center (the Hastings Center) and one university-based research center (the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University). Articles on bioethics began to appear in the peer-reviewed medical, nursing, and humanities literature and some books were published. There was only one journal in bioethics, The Hastings Center Report (which consolidated two previously separate journals from the Hastings Center). Graduate programs in bioethics and medical humanities in colleges and universities and fellowship training in bioethics and medical humanities in medical schools did not exist. Very little existed in colleges, universities, and medical schools in other countries. Now, of course, everything is different.Teachers, scholars, and students of bioethics and medical humanities should not take these remarkable changes for granted, for they represent a sustained and innovative interaction between medicine and the humanities. We have chosen the metaphor of “laying medicine open” to characterize the history of bioethics and medical humanities of the past three decades. This surgical metaphor was used in eighteenth-century Britain by a number of writers who wanted to make medical science and practice more accessible to the sick and to the lay public more generally (Lawrence 1975). We use the metaphor to characterize the efforts of teachers and [End Page 1] scholars over the past three decades and more to make the value-laden dimensions of biomedical science and practice and of health care policy more accessible to patients and to the lay public more generally. The result of this laying open of medicine has gone a long way toward bringing closer together the two cultures of science and the humanities that had, as C. P. Snow famously described, become significantly isolated from each otherAlbert Jonsen (1998) has recently contributed the first book-length history of what he calls the “birth” of bioethics, adding to the work of other scholars such as Warren Reich (1994; 1995) and Robert Baker (1993) and, before them, Corrado Viafora (1990) and David Rothman (1991). The articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal make additional contributions to the developing understanding of the history of the past thirty years of interaction between medicine and the humanities.Laurence McCullough provides an historical context for the three accounts of the recent laying open of medicine that follow. McCullough examines two times in the history of medicine when it has been laid open to accountability (in addition to its being laid open to and by bioethics and medical humanities). The first laying open occurred in the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory, who set out to create a profession of medicine in a true moral sense of a fiduciary profession by making medicine accountable for its scientific and moral quality. The second occurred in the late twentieth century in which the managed practice of medicine in general, and managed care in particular, have begun to lay medicine open to accountability for its scientific and moral quality, as well as its cost and, at least in the public sector, its accessibility. McCullough argues that, just as Gregory responded to the ethical challenges of medicine laid open more than two centuries ago, bioethics should respond to the ethical challenges in the current laying open of medicine.Warren Reich provides an account of André Hellegers, whose premature death left an enormous gap in the field that will never be filled. Reich claims that Hellegers was engaged substantially in much more than the laying open of medicine: he... (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren T. Reich, editor‐in‐chief.