Edmund D. Pellegrino has played a central role in shaping the fields of
bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. His writings encompass
original explorations of the healing relationship, the need to place
humanism in the medical curriculum, the nature of the patient's good,
and the importance of a virtue-based normative ethics for health care.
In this anthology, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., and Fabrice Jotterand
have created a rich presentation of Pellegrino's thought and its
development. Pellegrino's work has been dedicated to showing that
bioethics must be understood in the context of medical humanities, and
that medical humanities, in turn, must be understood in the context of
the philosophy of medicine. Arguing that bioethics should not be
restricted to topics such as abortion, third-party-assisted
reproduction, physician-assisted suicide, or cloning, Pellegrino has
instead stressed that such issues are shaped by foundational views
regarding the nature of the physician-patient relationship and the goals
of medicine, which are the proper focus of the philosophy of medicine.