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This guide is intended as an introduction to sources of information covering all aspects of ethics in the biosciences and the health sciences.  Comments and suggestions are most welcome.  See the contact information in the box on the right. 

Biomedical Ethics
"While bioethics, a part of applied ethics, is usually identified with medical ethics, in its broadest sense it is the study of the moral, social and political problems that arise out of biology and the life sciences generally and involve, either directly or indirectly, human wellbeing." [Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Medical Ethics
"Medical ethics was once concerned with the professional obligations of physicians, spelled out in codes of conduct such as the ancient Hippocratic oath and elaborated by contemporary professional societies. Today this subject is a broad, loosely defined collection of issues of morality and justice in health, health care and related fields. The term ‘bioethics’ is often used interchangeably, though it is also used with its original broad meaning, which included issues in ecology." [Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Nursing Ethics
"Nursing ethics may be defined simply in relation to what nurses do that doctors and others do not characteristically do; or in relation to the nursing perspective on any issues in health care and medicine. More radically, it claims to employ a distinctive conceptual framework, regarding care, rather than cure, as fundamental. Nursing ethics concerns itself with the relationship between ‘carer’ and ‘cared for’ and the meanings embedded in that relationship. It is the moral exploration of an illness or disability as a personal life crisis rather than an instance of a biomedical generalization." [Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

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