[Two years' experience teaching medical ethics in a hospital clinic course]

Ethics problems arise from conflict of values: a physician has to take charge of his patients, but advances of sciences and technics make such conflicts more and more frequent. Their solution cannot be left to a mere improvization. Medical ethics have to be taught. In Strasbourg, we have elected to teach compulsory medical ethics in the course of compulsory hospital training, for five mornings running, to groups of ten fifth-year medical students, the place being different each day. Fifteen departments including five specialties, internal medicine, intensive care, pediatrics, gynecology-obstetrics, geriatrics, are involved in this experience. The training takes place near the patient bed in the presence of a medical teacher. Communication and multi-disciplinarity are the characteristics. The teaching is done with the purpose of bringing about reflection in the students, of proposing methods for the discovering and the approach of ethics problems, of leading the students up to the enlightenment of their own scale of evaluation. A few previous lectures about history of ethics through different philosophical systems, about social, economical and cultural implications, are given for basic formation of the students. This teaching experience interests students and teachers greatly. The first ones have the opportunity to perceive a new dimension of medical responsibility, the second ones appreciate this form of recovered fellowship.