To the Editor:Re “Moral Dilemmas in Medical Care” (Opinion guest essay, May 8):It is unsettling, and dismaying, to read Dr. Carl Elliott’s account of moral lapses continuing to exist, if not thrive, in medical education.
As a neurology resident in the early 1970s, I was assigned a patient who was scheduled to have psychosurgery.
He was a prisoner who had murdered a nurse in a hospital basement, and the surgery to remove part of his brain was considered by the department to be a therapeutic and even forward-looking procedure.
This was despite its being widely discredited, and involving a prisoner who could not provide truly informed consent.
It is lamentable that even though bioethics programs are widely incorporated into medical education, moral and ethical transgressions remain a stubborn problem as part of medical structures’ groupthink.
Persons:
Carl Elliott’s