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36 pages, 449 KiB

Open AccessArticle

by Ursula Plöckinger and Ulrike Ernst-Auga

Religions 2024, 15(8), 909; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15080909 - 26 Jul 2024

Viewed by 1899

We discuss the concept of a ‘body’, the individual body as the lived experience of the body, the social body, shaped by the tensions between the demands of a social/moral order and the egocentric drives, and the body politic, as an institutionalized and disciplined body. We describe the body as it was perceived in Classical Greek Antiquity at the time when the Hippocratic Oath was first conceived, and any changes that may have occurred by Late Antiquity, using the concept of a body-world as represented by everyday life, the arts, politics, philosophy, and religion. This ‘recreated’ body-world elucidates how a person of Classical or Late Antiquity perceived her/his body via their ‘lived-in’ world and relates it to medical and philosophical thinking about the body as well as to concepts of health and disease. We demonstrate how the institutional structures of the Roman Empire and the Church influenced the way a body was understood, how the administrative and governmental needs led to the first developments of Public Health, and how the Christian understanding of the body as the body and spirit of Christ changed the attitude towards suicide, euthanasia, and abortion. These changes are reflected in the understanding of bioethical thinking and affected the interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences)

8 pages, 268 KiB

Open AccessEssay

Soft Skills Are Hard Skills—A Historical Perspective

by Silvia Iorio, Marco Cilione, Mariano Martini, Marco Tofani and Valentina Gazzaniga

Medicina 2022, 58(8), 1044; https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina58081044 - 3 Aug 2022

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 5076

Abstract

The increasingly swift changes in the field of medicine require a reassessment of the skills necessary for the training of technically qualified doctors. Today’s physicians also need to be capable of managing the complex issue of personal relationships with patients. Recent pedagogical debates have focused on so-called “soft skills”, whose acquisition is presented in literature as a quite recent addition to medical studies. Moreover, the historical investigation of deontological texts dating from the mid-nineteenth century back to the Hippocratic Oath shows that medicine has always discussed the need to integrate technical expertise in medicine with specific personal and relationship-based skills. Debates have often circled around whether these “soft skills” could actually be taught or how they could be successfully transmitted to training physicians. The belief that defining medicine is more complex than defining other similar sciences and that the instruments to be used in the relationship with patients cannot be limited to those provided by technical aspects shows a new awareness. Today, this view is often stated as an innovative realization on the part of doctors with regard to the complexity of training and action in a delicate area in which they are entrusted with the management of the balance of the system that is the human body. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Work Culture in Medicine: Ethical, Legal and Social Challenges)

11 pages, 186 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Big Data, Ethics and Religion: New Questions from a New Science

by Michael Fuller

Religions 2017, 8(5), 88; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050088 - 10 May 2017

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 15595

Abstract

Hopes, fears, and ethical concerns relating to technology are as old as technology itself. When considering the increase in the power of computers, and their ever-more widespread use over recent decades, concerns have been raised about the social impact of computers and about practical issues arising from their use: the manner in which data is harvested, the preservation of confidentiality where people’s personal information is concerned, the security of systems in which such data is stored, and so on. With the arrival of “big data” new ethical concerns surrounding computer-based technology arise—concerns connected not only with social issues, and with the generation of data and its security, but also with its interpretation by data scientists, and with the burgeoning trade in personal data. The first aim of this paper is to introduce some of these ethical issues, and the second is to suggest some possible ways in which they might be addressed. The latter includes some explorations of the ways in which insights from religious and theological perspectives might be valuable. It is urged that theology and data science might engage in mutually-beneficial dialogue. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Religion and the New Technologies)

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