Bioethics and the Contributions of Otto Guttentag

Abstract

Bioethics owes much of its popularity to Otto Guttentag, a German-trained homeopath who came to the United States in 1933. As a faculty member in the department of homeopathy at the University of California, San Francisco, he gained the respect of students and faculty. His experiences as a medical consultant in Germany after World War II convinced him about the importance of ethics in medical practice and research, a field in which he became a leader. He organized the first major bioethics conference and published the proceedings in Science in 1953. Later, Guttentag received NIH funding to study the effects of medical science on medical morality and ethics. Guttentag formulated the different roles of physician-friend and physician-researcher and believed that it was in the patient’s best interest for the two to be kept separate. He was instrumental in reorganizing German medical education after the war. Guttentag also introduced the teaching of medical ethics and humanities in US medical schools and created the Society for Health and Human Values, which eventually gave rise to the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.