What Percival Inherits: John Gregory’s Moral Revolution Against the Long Tradition of Entrepreneurial Medicine in the History of Western Medicine

Abstract

In this book I will use historically based, philosophical interpretation of primary-source and secondary-source texts to explain how the English physician-ethicist, Thomas Percival (1740–1804), having self-consciously joined the Scottish physician-ethicist, John Gregory (1724–1773), co-invented professional ethics in medicine in a moral revolution against the long tradition of entrepreneurial medicine in the history of Western medicine. To create his professional ethics in medicine Percival drew on: Baconian scientific medicine and its insistence on evidence-based reasoning; the Baconian moral science taught by his teachers at the Warrington Academy, as well as their distinctive Baconian and secular commitments as Dissenting Unitarians (one of the several groups of “rational dissenters,” a misnomer, as we shall see in Chap. 2; they were Baconian dissenters); David Hume’s moral science of sympathy; and Percival’s own, extensive scientific, medical, and moral writings – among the latter his very successful A Father’s Instructions that joined a literature to which genre Gregory had contributed (Gregory 1774). Percival also drew deeply on Gregory’s professional ethics in medicine and its discourse of the principle of sympathy and its professional regulatory virtues of tenderness and steadiness. This book therefore starts in this chapter with an account of Gregory’s professional ethics in medicine, which Percival inherits and to which he adds in original and important ways, as the reader will discover in Chap. 3.