John Gregory's medical ethics elucidates the concepts of compassion and empathy

Abstract

Purpose: This paper draws on eighteenth-century British medical ethics to elucidate compassion and empathy and explains how compassion and empathy can be taught, to rectify their frequent conflation.

Compassion in the history of medical ethics: The professional virtue of compassion was first described in eighteenth-century British medical ethics by the Scottish physician-ethicist, John Gregory (1724-1773) who built on the moral psychology of David Hume (1711-1776) and its principle of sympathy.

Compassion and empathy defined: Compassion is the habitual exercise of the affective capacity to engage, with self-discipline, in the experience of the patient and therefore become driven to provide effective care for the patient. Empathy is the habitual exercise of the cognitive capacity to imagine the experience of patient and to have reasons to care for the patient. There are rare clinical circumstances in which empathy should replace compassion, for example, in responding to abusive patients. Because the abstract concepts of medical ethics are translated into clinical practice by medical educators, we identify the pedagogical implications of these results by setting out a process for teaching compassion and empathy.

The task ahead: Eighteenth-century British medical ethics provides a clinically applicable, philosophical response to conflation of the moral virtue of compassion and the intellectual virtue of empathy and applying them clinically.

Keywords: Compassion; empathy; history of medical ethics; professional virtue; virtue.