ABSTRACT
The acceleration of technological and scientific development in the mid-nineteenth century affected every aspect of day-to-day modern life and was not limited to advances in medical science and technology. Some changes more directly affected, and somewhat exclusively affected, bioethics, and set the field on track eventually to develop a bioethical–medical industrial complex; that is, an authority and power that gave it a commanding social presence and facilitated its movement into nursing. The Seattle dialysis case would bring medical decisions regarding rationing into public consciousness, and the plight of children born with diminished cognitive ability would be poke at medicine. Both would facilitate the development of the field, as would the development of a range of bedside-care and hospital technologies. The Kennedy Fellowships in Medical Ethics, offered to 19 nurses, and the Georgetown University intensive bioethics courses, would subsequently facilitate the movement of bioethics into nursing.
