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Hello, in the 16th century Francis Bacon told us in his advancement of learning,

medicine is a science which has been more professed than labored and yet more labored than advanced,

the labe having been in my judgment rather than a circle than in a progression.

Well, after a century that's brought us penicillin, the discovery of DNA, heart transplants and keyhole surgery,

how we finally escaped the loop, or does our ethical application and what we can technologically achieve mean we are still caught in Bacon's Circle.

We'd me to discuss the ethics of Montmetson is the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, Parijaxon,

and Professor Sheila McLean, director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Metson and Glasgow University in author of Old Law New Metson.

I'm sorry about this voice, by the way, I seem to have contracted my own millennium bug.

Sheila McLean, Hippocrates called Metson and Art, 2,000 years later as we've heard Bacon said it was a science,

now towards the end of the 20th century, it has some aspects of religion.

Can you tell us how remarkable the 20th century has been in the advancements of Metson?

Well, I think one of the things it's done apart from the kind of amazing discoveries in scientific breakthroughs that you've mentioned

is also to challenge the individual of practitioners of Metson in a way that I think would be unheard of even up until the turn of the century.

And that's partly because the notion of Metson as an art was one with which I think people were very comfortable for a long time.

And of course the doctor in the community could actually probably do very little, I think it would be fair to say,

but did achieve a great deal just through the sort of placebo effect.

And then science as the newest discipline, oddly enough, but also the one of which really has taken over our thinking in this century,

seemed to transform Metson into a science and almost distance clinicians from their clients or patients.

And I think towards the end of the century what we're now seeing is a recognition that actually Metson is both a science and an art,

but as to how the practitioners of Metson and their patients actually deal with that I think is much more difficult because science seems to say,

I mean if we see Metson as a science and of course most of its major breakthroughs or the ones at least that are much wanted in the media are very scientific in essence.

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