First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

A keyword listing of serial titles currently received by the National Library of Medicine.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

This volume, which has developed from the Fourteenth Trans Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, September 5-8, 1982, at Tel Aviv University, Israel, contains the contributions of a group of distinguished scholars who together examine the ethical issues raised by the advance of biomedical science and technology. We are, of course, still at the beginning of a revolution in our understanding of human biology; scientific medicine and clinical research are scarcely one hundred years old. Both the sciences and the technology of medicine until ten or fifteen years ago had the feeling of the 19th century about them; we sense that they belonged to an older time; that era is ending. The next twenty-five to fifty years of investigative work belong to neurobiology, genetics, and reproductive biology. The technologies of information processing and imaging will make diagnosis and treatment almost incomprehensible by my generation of physicians. Our science and technology will become so powerful that we shall require all of the art and wisdom we can muster to be sure that they remain dedicated, as Francis Bacon hoped four centuries ago, "to the uses of life." It is well that, as philosophers and physicians, we grapple with the issues now when they are relatively simple, and while the pace of change is relatively slow. We require a strategy for the future; that strategy must be worked out by scientists, philosophers, physicians, lawyers, theologians, and, I should like to add, artists and poets.

The worldwide economic recession of the last years - sometimes described as an outright depression similar to the one of the early thirties - has led many health policy analysts and even policy makers to revive the old question of whether, and in what respect, there is a close relationship between economic development and health. In tackling this question, to day's health services research looks rather helpless: even if a truth has the appearance of a truism, it will not necessarily be aCknowledged in practice. While it is an established fact that social as well as (macro)economic conditions or events have an important influence on the health of people, this subject has been rarely pursued by medical or epidemiological research and rather has been treated - in industrial countries at least - as a quantit~ n~gligeable. Yet, this ahistoric and even parochial attitude must be questioned on methodological as well as political grounds. - As to methodological aspects, further investigation into the relation ship between health and the economy is essential in order to identify the real relevance, i. e. opportunity costs, of medical care; even more important, it might also direct attention to the interfaces - fairly neglected by our over-specialized system of sciences - between biome tries and econometrics, medicine and epidemiology, epidemiology and socio-economics. It is, hence,an area of research from which methodo l09iCa-l development can receive' major stimuli.