Hastings Cent Rep. 2021 Mar;51(2):3. doi: 10.1002/hast.1238.
Cultural historians and historians of medicine are a rarity in bioethics. Even those who write histories of bioethics are philosophers, sociologists, or theologians. Where have all the historians gone? If bioethics is to contribute to the urgent work of addressing social justice, structural racism, and health inequity, we bioethicists need to embrace history as a fully constituent part of our field. Historians can help us apprehend the ideas that shaped bioethics, and health policy more broadly, and discover the dissenting arguments that might inspire us now. Given our annus horribilis, history has become an instrumental necessity. It is only through the study of history that we can understand the past so as to reimagine how bioethics can influence health policy and work toward health equity.
文化历史学家和医学历史学家在生物伦理学领域较为罕见。即使是撰写生物伦理学历史的人，也是哲学家、社会学家或神学家。历史学家都去哪儿了？如果生物伦理学要为解决社会正义、结构性种族主义和健康不平等这一紧迫问题做出贡献，我们生物伦理学家就需要将历史作为我们领域的一个完全组成部分来接受。历史学家可以帮助我们理解塑造生物伦理学和更广泛的健康政策的思想，并发现现在可能激励我们的不同意见。鉴于我们经历了糟糕的一年，历史已成为一种必要手段。只有通过对历史的研究，我们才能了解过去，从而重新构想生物伦理学如何影响健康政策并努力实现健康公平。
