The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi­ cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol­ arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics.

Preface. 1: An Introduction to John Gregory's Medical Ethics. I. Gregory's Contributions to the History of Medical Ethics and the History of Medicine. II. Gregory's Contributions to Bioethics. III. Plan of this Book. IV. Conclusion. 2: John Gregory's Life and Times: An Intellectual History. I. Setting Gregory in Context. II. Scottish National Identity and the Social Principle. III. Great Expectations, 1724-1742: The `Academic Gregories'. IV. School Days, 1742-1746: Edinburgh and Leiden. V. Aberdeen, 1746-1754: Teaching, Practice, Marriage. VI. London, 1754-1755: Medical practice, the Bluestocking Circle. VII. Aberdeen, 1755-1764: Science of Man, Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Sympathy, and Laying Medicine Open. VIII. The Death of Gregory's Wife. IX. Edinburgh, 1764-1773: Professor of Medicine, the Royal Infirmary, Nervous Diseases, the Beattie-Hume Controversy, and Gregory's Correspondence with Mrs. Montagu. X. Gregory's Writings: Comparative View, A Father's Legacy, and Practice of Physic. XI. Gregory's Death. 3: Gregory's Medical Ethics. I. The Custom of Giving Preliminary Lectures: Leiden and Edinburgh. II. The Publication of Gregory's Lectures. III. Setting the Stage: Gregory's Intellectual Resources and Problem List. IV. The Texts. V. Gregory's Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine in its Intellectual and Moral Senses. 4: Assessing Gregory's Medical Ethics. I. Then-Contemporary Views of Gregory's Medical Ethics. II. Gregory's Influence. III. Gregory's Importance forBioethics. IV. Concluding Word. Notes. Bibliography. Index.