ABSTRACT
Like most of the ‘bodies’ in this volume, ‘the ethical’ is not to be found as such in medical textbooks. Nor is it a body that constitutes the object of a medical gaze in the manner of the ‘diseased body’ or the ‘clead body.’ On the contrary, contemporary medical ethics gazes critically at medicine. If the historical sociologists of the 1970s had ventured into the history of medical ethics in the twentieth century they might have discovered not only that their so-called ‘real ethics’ of doctor-patient relations were on the agenda of medicine long before the rise of bioethics, but also, that that agenda-setting could often be a part of a politically explicit strategy on the part of the medical profession. Catholicism and the reactions to it have borne importantly on medical ethics throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
