ABSTRACT
Writing this autobiography has an antecedent. In April 2002, during the month that I spent as a visiting professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, several Japanese colleagues—a historian, a sociologist, a jurist, and an editor-publisher 1 —organized a series of evening conversations with me. These were structured around their interest in my long career as a sociologist of medicine, my sustained involvement with ethical, as well as social and cultural aspects of health, illness, and medicine, and my relationship to the young field of bioethics. My interlocutors seemed to regard me as a “mother”—even a “grandmother”—of medical sociology, and also as a founding, social scientist figure in U.S. bioethics. They tape-recorded the oral history that they elicited from me, and gave me the chance to lightly edit the transcribed text. It was then translated into Japanese, and published in Tokyo as a small book with a title that in English was equivalent to Looking Intently At Bioethics: Fifty Years as a Medical Sociologist? 2
