한국의 문화전통과 의료전문직 윤리

Korean medical society has been in a big turmoil since the second part of the 1990s. The first impetus for this turmoil was given by a court rule against doctors who discharged critically injured patient and removed life-sustaining appliances following the request of the patient's wife. Other members of the family filed a law suit against the doctors and the wife, and they have become convicted murderers according to the criminal law.

When the debate began to subside, another big trouble broke out. The government tried to implement the policy of division between prescription and preparation of drugs in the year 2000. Physicians regarded this policy as another attack on their professional autonomy and interest. To everyone's surprise they went on a strike.

The third impact on the already confounded situation was the report that a team of Korean scientists has cloned human embryos by somatic cell nucleus transfer and extracted stem cells for the first time in the world.

I argue that the three cases have been and will be the paradigm cases for the moral discourse in Korean health care field. Although the nature of the problems are not that different from the cases of the west, the way of discussion and the context of it is not be the same. Korean people have the tradition of emphasizing virtuous doctors embodying good human nature (德醫) rather than the specific medical virtues(醫德) they have.

Virtuous doctors are the medical professionals who not only listen to the voices of patients but also deeply tune into the concrete situation of the people suffering from various problems. This kind of committment to the people coincides with the spirit of the medical professionalism and "thick" version of virtue ethics developed in the west. All these are the moral resources we can mobilize to make a moral contract of our own.