The article summarizes results from documental research − more particularly from one of the aims of such research, that of discussing the teaching of ethics and bioethics in the process of doctor and nurse training − by means of textual mediation in academic papers and scientific production on related themes. The methodology employed was Michel Foucault's post-structuralist approach; the source texts were academic documents from medicine and nurse training courses from four federal universities in southern Brazil. The insertion of ethical/bioethical issues in the professional formation was examined so as to question how the (strategic and technological) unfoldings of this discourse penetrate in the process of constructing health care professional subjects, and generate certain modes of conceiving and of intervening by these subjects. We would like to emphasise the condition of bioethics as a silenced and invisible knowledge − but nevertheless productive − since its questioning and critical potential is reduced to a set of formulations isolated from the surrounding debates. Such condition links elements that are in the process of emerging in the bioethical discourse with the already established routes for what has been historically defined as ethical formation of health care professionals.
bioethics; professional education; ethical formation of health care professionals