Abstract

MAINETTI, José Alberto. THE BIOETHICAL COMPLEX: PIGMALION, NARCISSUS AND KNOCK. rev.latinoam.bioet. [online]. 2008, vol.8, n.2, pp.30-37. ISSN 1657-4702.

The transformations of medicine, which gave birth to Bioethics as a new medical ethics, are of three different kinds, though they keep a sense of unity among them. In the first place, the techno-scientific transformation oriented to the anthropoplastic medicine, or medicine of desire, remodeler of man's nature. In the second place, a social transformation of the doctor-patient relationship, introducing the latter into therapeutic decision-making, and finally, a political transformation in health, which has become a primary social good in the expansive economy of this time. Three symbolic characters embody respectively these transformations of medicine. The first is Pygmalion, the Cypriot sculptor who gives life to the statue he made with his own hands; the second one is Narcissus, the beautiful youth, who succumbed to his own reflection; the third is Knock, the dramatic character, who realizes the medicalization of life through his professional fanaticism. Pygmalion, Narcissus and Knock identify our postmodern culture, and within it they define the moral matter of today's medicine.

Keywords : Principlism; beneficence and nomaleficence; autonomy; justice; postmodern culture.

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