Reiser Speaks On Medical Ethics

Physicians have an obligation to society to act as educators as well as diagnosticians, Stanley J. Reiser, associate professor of the History of Medicine, said last night at the sixth Cambridge Forum lecture of the fall.

"People as patients have asserted a need to know more about their health care," Reiser told a group of more than 50, adding that the role of the physician in society is to establish channels of communication between doctors and patients that help patients understand more about the nature of their problems.

Reiser said that because of the increasing number of technological advancements in medicine, doctors have begun "to confront dilemmas they had never faced before" in dealing with issues such as euthanasia and the maintenance of terminally ill patients on artificial respirators.