[Christian social ethics and medicine]

In bygone centuries, the maxim of doing no harm was enough to define intervention by a doctor; now, in contrast, dealing with the possibilities opened up by modern medical technology demands increasingly careful observance of the moral virtue of the correct degree of moderation. The present ethical challenge when medical decisions have to be made is not simply to be allowed to do everything possible. The art of medical intervention has to be exercised with due respect for the concept of temperantia medici, which, however, has to have significance not only in the concrete individual case, but also in the wider context of social ethics, that is to say for health services as a whole. The anonymity resulting from increasing specialization, the tendency to think impersonally in terms of probabilities following the introduction of screening programmes with routine examinations and the connected legalization of medicine are addressed as particularly important problems in this respect; all these trends beset the personal doctor-patient relationship with difficulties and suggest the procedure with the greatest technological input as the safest and most convenient solution, thus making it difficult to find the correct degree of moderation. As a result of all this, modern medicine is evidently being regarded with increasing scepticism by wide sections of the population, a situation demanding an ethically appropriate return to the old medical virtue of moderation.