Misplaced Pages

This article may require cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards. The specific problem is: A significant amount of the text is not verified. Please help improve this article if you can. (June 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Daniel K. Sokol (born 1978) is a barrister and medical ethicist known for his academic and journalistic writings on the ethics of medicine.

He lectures nationally and internationally, and writes a regular column in the British Medical Journal under the sobriquet Ethics Man. Up until January 2014 Sokol was an honorary Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law at King's College London. His contract was terminated due to Sokol setting up a for-profit legal enterprise that represented students in exam appeals. He is a member of 12 King's Bench Walk, a leading barristers' chambers in London, England. In late 2019 Sokol founded the Centre for Remedial Ethics.

Education and early life

Sokol was born in Puyricard, France, and educated in France until the age of 11. He attended Winchester College before studying Linguistics and French Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. As an undergraduate at Oxford he won the 3rd Oxfordshire Science Writing competition in 1999. He received his Bachelor of Arts (1st class) in 2001 and obtained a Wellcome Trust Award to study a master's degree in Social and Economic History (specialising in the History of Medicine) at Green College, Oxford. He then studied for a Master's in Medical Ethics at Imperial College London and, under the supervision of Raanan Gillon and Tim Rhodes, completed a PhD in the subject also funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Following his PhD, he was appointed a lecturer in Ethics at Keele University. In 2008, he moved to St George's, University of London, before qualifying as a barrister at the Inner Temple in 2011.

Career

Sokol has called for the introduction of professional clinical ethicists in British hospitals, argued that doctors have a strong but not absolute duty of care in times of virulent epidemics, and defended the moral permissibility of clinicians deceiving patients in rare circumstances.

In 2005, Sokol co-authored, with Gillian Bergson, an award-winning textbook on medical ethics and law for students. Since 2007, he has written a regular column (as Ethics Man) for the British Medical Journal.

In 2012, Sokol published Doing Clinical Ethics (Springer), a textbook for clinicians.

In late 2012, Sokol founded Alpha Academic Appeals, whose aim is to help university students appeal unjust examination results. This led to King's College London terminating his appointment as an honorary member of the teaching staff in 2014 after he had held the position for less than a year. This was on the basis that Alpha was charging students for services that they could obtain for free from the students' union, and therefore it would be undesirable for the College to continue its association with Sokol.

In 2013, he co-authored, with Isabel McArdle, Pupillage Inside Out (Sweet & Maxwell), a guide on the pupillage year (i.e., the first year of a barrister's practice).

He has been a visiting scholar in bioethics at Washington Hospital Center, Washington, D.C., and Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, Oregon, and has sat on a number of committees, including those of the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He is the senior editor of the Postgraduate Medical Journal.

In October 2018 Book Guild Publishing released his book 'Tough Choices: Stories from the Front Line of Medical Ethics', a text aimed at a general readership.

Sokol set up the Centre for Remedial Ethics in November 2019, which provides bespoke one-to-one medical ethics courses to clinicians undergoing disciplinary procedures.

Personal life

In his personal life, Sokol is a semi-professional magician. He is married, and has three brothers (André, Georges and Charlie) who also live in London. He is the son of Ronald P. Sokol and Junko Sokol.

References

1. Daniel Sokol publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
2. Sokol, Daniel (2017). "Charlie Gard case: an ethicist in the courtroom". BMJ: j3451. doi:10.1136/bmj.j3451. ISSN 0959-8138. S2CID 37219934.
3. Garner, Richard (2014). "King's College London terminates contract of lecturer who set up legal firm to help students challenge exam results". The Independent. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
4. https://www.remedialethics.co.uk/
5. Sokol, Daniel (2006). Truth-telling and deception in contemporary medical practice : an empirical and philosophical analysis. copac.jisc.ac.uk (PhD thesis). Imperial College London (University of London). hdl:10044/1/8026. OCLC 500315795. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.434932.
6. Sokol, Daniel K (2005). "Meeting the ethical needs of doctors". BMJ. 330 (7494): 741–742. doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7494.741. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 555865. PMID 15802701.
7. Sokol, Daniel K. (2006). "Virulent Epidemics and Scope of Healthcare Workers' Duty of Care". Emerging Infectious Diseases. 12 (8): 1238–1241. doi:10.3201/eid1208.060360. ISSN 1080-6040. PMC 3291234. PMID 16965703.
8. Sokol, Daniel K. (2007). "Can deceiving patients be morally acceptable?". BMJ. 334 (7601): 984–986. doi:10.1136/bmj.39184.419826.80. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 1867874. PMID 17494019.
9. Sokol, Daniel; Bergson, Gillian (2005). Medical ethics and law; surviving on the wards and passing exams. London: Trauma Publishing. ISBN 0-9547657-1-0.
10. Sokol, Daniel (2012). Doing clinical ethics. Dordrecht: Springer. ISBN 978-94-007-2782-3.
11. "About Us". Alpha Academic Appeals. Retrieved 31 July 2013.
12. "Lawyer loses lectureship over student appeals business". 2 January 2014.
13. Sokol, Daniel (2013). Pupillage inside out. London: Sweet & Maxwell. ISBN 978-0-414-02913-2.
14. "Tough Choices - The Book Guild Ltd". www.bookguild.co.uk. Archived from the original on 11 October 2018.
15. Sokol, Daniel K. (25 October 2018). Tough Choices: Stories from the Front Line of Medical Ethics. Book Guild Publishing, Limited. ISBN 9781912575480.
16. https://www.remedialethics.co.uk/
17. "Remedial Ethics for Clinicians". 8 December 2019.
18. Lipsett, Anthea (2006). "An ethicist skilled in the magical arts of deception". Times Higher Education.
19. Sokol, Daniel (2016). "Dr Daniel K Sokol". medicalethicist.net.

• Living people
• 1978 births
• 21st-century British philosophers
• Bioethicists
• British barristers
• British columnists
• Alumni of the University of Oxford
• Presidents of the Osler Club of London