ABSTRACT
The topics that preoccupied psychologists and anthropologists alike during the first half of the twentieth century were foreign to the concerns of physicians, and they tended to distract attention from those shared features of human nature which define the physiological aspects of human medicine and so help to determine the associated ethical demands. The new attention to applied ethics has done much to dispel the miasma of subjectivity that was cast around ethics as a result of its association with anthropology and psychology. From the mid-nineteenth century on, then, British and American moral philosophers treated ethics as a field for general theoretical inquiries and paid little attention to issues of application or particular types of cases. The cross-cultural study of epidemiology and kindred subjects – what may be called ‘comparative medicine’ – has to be distinguished sharply from the intracultural study of ‘ethnomedicine.’.
