Trusting Doctors:
The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine
Jonathan B. Imber

Cloth | 2008 | $29.95 / £20.95
296 pp. | 6 x 9 | 2 halftones. 1 table.

e-Book | 2009 | $29.95 | ISBN: 978-1-4008-2889-0

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For more than a century, the American medical profession insisted that doctors be rigorously trained in medical science and dedicated to professional ethics. Patients revered their doctors as representatives of a sacred vocation. Do we still trust doctors with the same conviction? In Trusting Doctors, Jonathan Imber attributes the development of patients' faith in doctors to the inspiration and influence of Protestant and Catholic clergymen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He explains that as the influence of clergymen waned, and as reliance on medical technology increased, patients' trust in doctors steadily declined.

Trusting Doctors discusses the emphasis that Protestant clergymen placed on the physician's vocation; the focus that Catholic moralists put on specific dilemmas faced in daily medical practice; and the loss of unchallenged authority experienced by doctors after World War II, when practitioners became valued for their technical competence rather than their personal integrity. Imber shows how the clergy gradually lost their impact in defining the physician's moral character, and how vocal critics of medicine contributed to a decline in patient confidence. The author argues that as modern medicine becomes defined by specialization, rapid medical advance, profit-driven industry, and ever more anxious patients, the future for a renewed trust in doctors will be confronted by even greater challenges.

Trusting Doctors provides valuable insights into the religious underpinnings of the doctor-patient relationship and raises critical questions about the ultimate place of the medical profession in American life and culture.

Jonathan B. Imber is the Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics and professor of sociology at Wellesley College. He is the author of Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine.

Review:

"Trusting Doctors can strongly be recommended as a reference text for all teachers in the sociology and bio ethical fields and should be referred to by those who determine and regularly change the content of Medical School teaching."--Sam Mellick, CBE, Supreme Court Library Review of Books

Endorsements:

"Jonathan Imber's Trusting Doctors is an important, interesting, and readable book. We all know that our modern doctors do not have the social aura they once did. Imber effectively tells us the eye-opening story of why that change has happened."--Daniel Callahan, cofounder of the Hastings Center

"Doctors and people who have no choice but to trust doctors--which means all of us--need to read this book. With both sympathy and uncompromising honesty, Jonathan Imber traces the frequently troubled history of a medical profession that needs to attend to its increasingly fragile moral authority."--Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of the journal First Things

"Trusting Doctors is a major book, a benchmark on medical morality and trust, and an exemplar of religion's impact on medicine."--Peter Conrad, Brandeis University

"This important book challenges many ideas that have long been taken for granted in medical sociology and the history of medicine: ideas about the work of bioethics and epidemiology, as well as the relation between religion and medicine."--Raymond G. De Vries, University of Michigan

Table of Contents:

Preface: A Sociological Perspective xi
Introduction xvii

Part One: Religious Foundations of Trust in Medicine
Chapter 1: Protestantism, Piety, and Professionalism 3
Chapter 2: The Infl uence of Catholic Perspectives 22
Chapter 3: The Scientifi c Challenge to Faith 43
Chapter 4: Public Health, Public Trust, and the Professionalization of Medicine 65

Part Two: Beyond the Golden Age of Trust in Medicine
Chapter 5: The Growth of Popular Distrust in Medicine 107
Chapter 6: The Evolution of Bioethics 130
Chapter 7: Anxiety in the Age of Epidemiology 144
Chapter 8: Trust and Mortality 167

Acknowledgments 197
Appendix 1: Extant Addresses, Sermons, and Eulogies by Clergymen 201
Appendix 2: Philadelphia Medical Sermons 208
Appendix 3: Long Island College Hospital Commencements, 1860-1899 210
Notes 213
Index 265

Subject Areas:

• Sociology
• History of Science and Medicine, Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy

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File created: 11/4/2009

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