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Samuel Southard, PhD
Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, Calif

JAMA. 1991;266(24):3422-3423.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The AMA Council's report on use of animals¹ and the survey that preceded it² are examples of a pragmatic approach that extinguishes the moral issue that prompted the report. Majority opinions are presented from a survey of what is without reference to what ought to be. The article discussed cost factors and student compliance apart from personal preference or moral imperatives.

Reporting or surveying out of moral context is a tried, but not necessarily true, way to solve issues that intrude on professional prerogatives. I first met this complacent myopia as a first-year medical student in 1945. There was a woman in our class! Most of us made a pragmatic conclusion: no patient will have confidence in a female physician, so why is she here?

Ten years later I found a similar "factual" approach in literature I used for a course on medical ethics in . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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