Fortifying medical ethics with human rights and conscience: A review of Thomas Faunce, Pilgrims in Medicine NOTE: This review article was originally published on H-Net Reviews, 2006. Thomas Alured Faunce. Pilgrims in Medicine: An Allegory of Medical Humanities, Foundational Virtues, Ethical Principles, Law and Human Rights in Medical Personal and Professional Development. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2005. xxiv + 651 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $263 (cloth), ISBN 90-04-13962-1 Reviewed for H-Histsex by Robert Darby, independent scholar, Canberra, Australia The unpretentious medical school at the Australian National University can be approached along a meandering path which leads you past some of the most attractively landscaped corners of the campus. Plantings of elms, gingkos, pines, oaks, beeches and eucalypts provide welcome shade from the fierce Canberra heat, while native ground covers thrive in the patches of sunlight. It is not the most direct means of access, but the pathway takes you past many botanical features that you would otherwise miss, each of which has potential to make a contribution to the goals of education, whether broadening knowledge, sharpening perceptions or honing sensibility. Something of the same approach has been taken by Thomas Faunce, senior lecturer in both the medical school and the college of law, in this remarkable text: like the pathway, Pilgrims in Medicine takes the reader on an unpredictable safari through the history, the schools of thought and the perennial issues of medical ethics, pausing here and there to contemplate an interesting or controversial growth, hurrying past the more common or less contentious questions, and enlivening the journey with references to novels, plays, films and paintings. Although Dr Faunce takes his literary conceit – the idea of pilgrims – from The Canterbury Tales, the book is not structured as a series of stories from different members of the band. Instead, we hear the voice of Dr Corambis (surely a persona for the author) lecturing to his students; with names such as Legalism, Virtue Ethics, Political Correctness etc, they embody moral principles in the manner of a mediaeval miracle play; their comments on the professor’s discourse and reports of incidents from their clinical or personal experience reflect their differing outlooks and approaches to life. The chapters move through time as well as subject matter. The students graduate and take up their individual career paths, and one of them eventually succeeds Dr Corambis as the lecturer: in the final chapter, as Professor Virtue Ethics, he attempts to draw together “all the strands of an integrated system of doctor-patient regulation.” Although the book deals with fairly abstract concepts intended to have universal validity, an attractive and often amusing feature is its firm location in a real place, the Australian Capital Territory, though it is referred to, rather playfully, throughout as Uqbar, after a story about an imaginary country by Jorge Luis Borges. The somewhat remote principles discussed are brought down to earth by references to the smell of bushfires, currawongs carolling in the gum trees, possums scampering over the roof, splashes of mud from a bicycle tyre, and the students’ experience in the wards of Canberra and other rural hospitals. We are