Epidemiology and Informed Consent

This chapter focuses on informed consent, which is a central concept and practice in the protection of the rights and interests of both patients receiving clinical care and individuals participating in research. It addresses the commitment to the ethical principles underlying informed consent that dates back to the early twentieth century, as reflected in many countries' laws governing the physician–patient relationship. It also recounts how informed consent was codified into national policies and international guidelines and standards for research on human subjects. The chapter explores the parallel origins of informed consent and its applications, which are based on distinctions between clinical practice and research and do not naturally apply to or readily translate to epidemiology. It outlines the requirements for consent that have been and are treated differently in epidemiology depending on the type of activity and sometimes the practicability of seeking consent from participants.

Bioethics in crisis or the crisis of bioethics? : An Anthropology of Pandemic in the Medicalized Society

We will discuss (…) the need for ethics in times of crisis. Many people consider ethics and bioethics and the call for principles to be bureaucratic obstacles to obtaining a rapid response from the population, for example, to achieve vaccines in record time, to immunize the population, to establish unpopular but necessary measures, such as closing borders and non-compliance with fundamental principles of the European Union, establishing public policies aimed at herd immunity or, conversely, closing most activities considered essential in the economy, to ensure social distancing and self-isolation of the population. These measures are understood as derogations from ethics or bioethics when targeting medical research on human subjects performed faster than required by standard procedure, or the implementation of innovative therapeutic practices that have not previously been studied by clinical trials to certify that there are no known side effects.

Ethics in clinical research

Ethics in medical education research is associated with any research concerning human participants and including anthropological tissue conducted by supervising and scholars of the University. It is associated with the accountability of the researcher, to be honest, and privacy and confidentially and autonomy and respectfully to all participants who affected by their research studies. Objectives of the review: The motivation behind this report is to look at the ethical issues raised when investigating including human members. In addition, to demonstrate the important ethical consideration with academic medical research. Conclusion: Ethics of restorative research on human subjects should be clinically supported and deductively stable. Educated consent is a compulsory segment of any clinical research. Investigators are committed to configuration look into protocols that build up guidelines of logical respectability, safeguard ethical and authoritative issues of the human subjects, and follow the conventions for forthcoming survey by independent research morals boards of trustees.

Bodies and Buildings

Issues around the body have tended to be seen as the concerns of medical materialists and utilitarians, but rarely medievalists. This perception is reflected in the fact that the body only features occasionally in scholarship on Victorian medievalism. However, this chapter makes the claim that medievalists were deeply invested in issues of health and death, as well as anatomy and other branches of medicine. Moreover, medievalists often evoked the past in support of views about the ethics and care of the body that were surprisingly comparable to that of their supposed sworn enemies, materialists and utilitarians. There is a strain of thought, and an aesthetics, that runs through Victorian culture, which could be called ‘materialist medievalism’. I argue that the view of a bifurcated Victorian society has obscured how often opinions between seemingly incompatible thinkers overlapped on aesthetic, philosophical, and ‘condition of England’ questions that focused on the body. It is my hope that this reconsideration will help us better understand the Victorian foundations of our modern concerns with surveillance, medical research on human subjects, health and well-being in urban environments, and memorialization and care of the dead.

Risk, double effect and the social benefit requirement

Many ethicists maintain that medical research on human subjects that presents no prospect of direct medical benefit must have a prospect of social benefit to be ethical. Payment is not the sort of benefit that justifies exposing subjects to risk. Alan Wertheimer has raised a serious challenge to this view, pointing out that in industry, social value is not considered necessary to make dangerous jobs ethical. This article argues that Wertheimer was correct to think that the ethics of hazard pay should be the same in medical research and in business. Nevertheless, a qualified social benefit requirement should apply in both fields. For a study or a job with significant net physical risk to be ethical, it must have social value beyond the satisfaction of ordinary preferences, including the preference for money. The requirement derives from a non-absolutist version of the doctrine of double effect. If a risky study or a dangerous job has no distinctive social value, and hazard pay is subjects' or workers’ only reason to undergo risks, the very fact that they undergo risk is intended as a means to a financial end. Inviting people to enrol in such a study or to take such a job wrongfully treats people as mere means. By contrast, if a study or a job has social value, people can participate with a primary end other than money, even if they accept compensation. Researchers or employers do not intend but merely foresee risks to subjects or workers.

From the Ethics of the Research Project to the Ethical Communication of Science

A postmodern interference between bioethics, epistemology, and philosophy of science arises from the field of ethics of research on human subjects. Being a research with a high level of subjectivity, it will also load the researcher with the responsibility towards the social meaning of the results, the correctness of using the methodology, honesty, presenting the limits of research, including the epistemic and methodological ones, as well as the needs of the subjects participating in the investigation. The ethics of research is based on a series of principles, of which the most significant are the honesty of obtaining and presenting results, the non-harm of human subjects, the respect for the autonomy of the subjects, and the principle of beneficence.