ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and content of medical ethics in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus will be primarily on the British Medical Association (BMA), and the work of its Central Ethical Committee (CEC) particularly between 1902 and 1948. The chapter also discusses the basic historiographical problems raised in writing a history of medical ethics, as well as making more general comments on the light this study may shed on the social function of medical ethics. Medical ethics can thus be seen as an integral part of medicine's strategy of professionalisation, by adjudicating between right and wrong medical behaviour where this is not defined by law. It plays a key part in the continual re-negotiation of the social contract between profession, patients and society, in the definition of the characteristics and role of doctors, and in the definition of who and what lies beyond the medical pale.
