Topic
Medical humanities
The history, ethics, and human meaning of medicine, read alongside the science.
This page collects every article by Dr. Damon Tojjar in this topic. For all topics see browse by topic, and for the source-anchored record see damontojjar.com/record.
Articles in this topic (11)
- The Belmont Report and the Three Principles Behind Every Ethics Review
The Belmont Report is the 1979 document that compressed the ethics of human research into three principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. A federal...
- The Declaration of Helsinki and What Its 2024 Revision Added
The Declaration of Helsinki is the World Medical Association's statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human participants, first adopted in...
- Henrietta Lacks, HeLa Cells, and the Consent Problem in Tissue Research
The cells that became the HeLa line were taken from Henrietta Lacks's cervical tumor at Johns Hopkins in 1951 without her knowledge, and for decades neither she nor...
- Can Empathy Be Measured? What the Jefferson Scale Actually Captures
Empathy can be measured, but only in the narrow, operational sense that any psychological quality can be measured: you define it precisely, write questions that...
- Narrative Medicine and Why Patient Stories Matter
Narrative medicine is the practice of listening to a patient's own account of being ill and reading that account with the same attention a careful reader gives a...
- The Ethics of Uncertainty in Medicine
Acknowledging uncertainty is an ethical act, not a confession of weakness. Medicine runs on evidence that is always partial, drawn from populations that may not...
- The First Randomized Controlled Trial and Why Its Design Still Matters
The trial widely accepted as the first properly randomized controlled trial was the Medical Research Council's 1948 study of streptomycin for pulmonary...
- A Short History of Evidence-Based Medicine
Evidence-based medicine is the practice of grounding clinical decisions in the best available research evidence, weighed together with clinical judgment and the...
- The Nuremberg Code and Where Voluntary Consent Began
On August 19, 1947, the judges in the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg delivered a judgment that set out ten numbered rules for experimentation on human beings, and they...
- What the Tuskegee Study Changed About Research Oversight
The Tuskegee Study did not quietly reform American research; it forced a legal reckoning that built the oversight system we still use. Between 1932 and 1972, the...
- Why the Words of a Diagnosis Matter
The words of a diagnosis matter because a diagnosis is never only information. The moment a condition is named, the name starts doing work: it tells a person what...