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

Medicine is a science which hath been more professed than labored, and yet more labored than

advanced, the labor having been in my judgment rather in a circle than in a progression.

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

have we finally escaped the loop or does

our ethical application of what we can technologically achieve mean we are still

caught in Bacon's circle. With me to discuss the ethics of modern medicine is

the president of the Royal College of Surgeons,

Barry Jackson, and Professor Sheila McLean, director of the Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine

at Glasgow University, and author of Old Law and New Medicine.

I'm sorry about this voice by the way I seemed to have

contracted my own millennium bug. Sheila McClain, Hippocrates called Medicine and Art,

2,000 years later as we've heard Bacon said it was a science. Now towards the end of the

20th century had to some aspects of religion. Can you tell us how remarkable the

20th century has been in the advancement of medicine? Well I think 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 an individual of practitioners of medicine 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 medicine is 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 see but did achieve a great deal just through the

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