Beginning in the late 19th century, scientific medicine took unprecedented strides in reducing infectious disease and prolonging life. New public health measures, the rise of bacteriology, the reform of medical education, a virtual explosion of new hospitals, and innovations in diagnostic techniques and therapeutic resources—all pointed toward a seemingly limitless horizon of medical progress. Physicians in the United States had little reason to anticipate the coming assaults on their prestige and moral authority. Sometime in the mid-1960s, however, the bloom began to fall from the rose of modern medicine.
By the early 1990s, vast and unsettling changes had taken place, and a new sense of limits emerged. Almost every aspect of medical practice had been altered. Revelations of abuse in medical experimentation led to new federal regulations for the protection of human and animal subjects. Hospitals were increasingly perceived as strange places dominated by technology, where patients' rights were ignored and bureaucracy prevailed over compassion. Decisions at the bedside were no longer the exclusive concern of an individual physician and patient.
These changes and challenges revealed that scientific medicine—a profession that had explicitly detached itself from broader frameworks of meaning and value—was not equipped to handle the moral and existential questions produced by its own power. In response, entirely new fields of academic inquiry, education, and professional practice arose. These fields became known as bioethics and the medical humanities, and their experts began to grapple with such problematic issues as the protection of research subjects, the goals of medicine, the definitions of death, the rights of patients, the cessation of treatment, the meaning of illness, and the distribution of health care resources.
http://www.acpmedicine.com/wnim/acp_0307.htm#L1
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