The Role of Medical Associations in Developing Professional Values

Abstract

Thousands of health professionals who share common interests enroll in associations by their own choices. In China medical associations are academic organizations classified by specialty, and membership is voluntary. Medical associations are not trade guilds, nor are they family or religious groups or professional societies. Each has its own constitution. They include the China Medical Association (CME), Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine Association, Chinese Nursing Association, Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, and Chinese Association of Combined Chinese Traditional and Western Medicine. Some were founded nearly 100 years ago, such as the China Medical Association, founded in 1915; the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association; and the Chinese Nurses' Association (now the Chinese Nursing Association), founded in 1909. Other early modern organizations were Doctoring, founded in 1897 in Shanghai; the Shanghai Chief Association of Medicine (1906); and the China Medical Research Institution (1904).[1] Medical associations in China are expected to establish professional standards (both technical and ethical) to guarantee individual or public health, to disseminate knowledge of new medical advances and techniques, and to spread medical ethics. Each association is expected to protect its members' interests as well. Members are expected to contribute their membership responsibilities and enjoy corresponding privileges. They are given opportunities to carry forward medical science by publishing their new findings and exchanging their ideas in the association's academic forum or journals, and receive the latest medical information to promote individual academic ability and moral values as well. Medical associations in China are thus both academic organizations designed to spread medical knowledge and organizations that cultivate medical ethics. Contemporary medical associations are the product of modern science and technology, but they have ancestors in China's long history. The earliest medical association, Yititang Association of Benevolent Doctors, was founded in 1568 during the Ming Dynasty by Xu Chunpu, the emperor's physician.[2] The tenet of the association was to practice medicine as a humane art and to promote medical professional values, its main tasks were to discuss medical skills and promote professional competence. Its members--forty-six physicians from various provinces who were living in Beijing at that time--were expected to adhere to twenty-two precepts: sincerity, good sense, self-restraint, prudence, reason, high morale, self-improvement, teaching, being good at pulse feeling, careful prescription, cautiousness, sympathy, self-respect, abiding the law of nature, devotion, avoidance of avarice, pity for the poor, self-fulfillment, understanding, wisdom, and not participating in abuse. Although it set out an ideal academic attitude, methods, and key points in pursuing and promoting professional values, the Yititang Association of Benevolent Doctors ultimately had little impact on later medical associations. The main ideas of medical ethics in China are to cherish life and fulfill one's medical duties accordingly. Medical associations are expected to disseminate bioethical values. The 1980s began what might be described as an ethical Renaissance in China. Academic exchange in ethics among medical associations at all levels took place frequently. International and national experts were invited to give lectures, and seminars were held to disseminate theories of medical ethics and achievements in bioethics. Thousands of medical professionals in teaching and research have communicated ideas with each other, published their papers and accomplishments in a variety of journals, such as Medicine and Philosophy and launched a new national publication, Chinese Medical Ethics. In 1988 the China Medical Association established the Chinese Association of Medical Ethics, which unites medical science and medical humanism structurally and serves to support and disseminate research in medical ethics and bioethics. …