AMA Journal of Ethics

This group of paintings portrays beauty and strength among front-line clinicians in a hectic emergency room during the COVID-19 pandemic. Head-to-toe personal protective equipment covers their fear. Vibrant colors and strange perspectives help question the reality through which they and their patients lived.

This oil painting of a crowded elevator carriage suggests our numerous shared uncertainties, risk of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and lack of knowledge about our and others’ risk of death from COVID-19. Personal protective equipment is uncomfortable, but it’s less uncomfortable, perhaps, than knowing our safety depends so much on others’ behaviors.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, masking and hand hygiene are key to individual and public health. Yet many people do not have access to clean water. This painting reiterates the importance of water for health and reminds us to be grateful stewards of this precious natural resource.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected patients of color and illuminates long-standing inequity in health status, health outcomes, and access to health care. Maldistribution of burden of disease, risk exposure, and how vulnerable we and those among us are to our lives unraveling is not merely unfortunate, not simply due to a bad turn of the cosmic wheel, but unjust, as illustrated in this digital self-portrait.

This watercolor painting looks to our 20th-century ancestors who fought to establish their, and many of our, voting rights.

Guidance from the Code addresses legitimacy and trustworthiness of information from unethical experimentation.

Perils of physicians intentionally harming individuals in errant attempts to strengthen a community have been illuminated by the Holocaust.

One health professions school views the Holocaust as fundamental content knowledge in modern health care ethics, but teaching it is difficult.