Papers presented at a symposium on philosophy and medicine at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1974 were published in the inaugural volume of this series. To help celebrate more than 20 years of extraordinary success with the series, another symposium was convened in Galveston in 1995. The convenors asked the participants these questions: In what ways and to what ends have academic humanists and medical scientists and practitioners becom...

This textbook brings the humanities to students in order to evoke the humanity of students. It helps to form individuals who take charge of their own minds, who are free from narrow and unreflective forms of thought, and who act compassionately in their public and professional worlds. Using concepts and methods of the humanities, the book addresses undergraduate and premed students, medical students, and students in other health professions, as well as physicians and other healthcare pract...

Scientists conducting human genome research are identifying genetic disorders and traits at an accelerating rate. Genetic factors in human behavior appear particularly complex and slow to emerge, yet are raising their own set of difficult ethical, legal, and social issues. In Behavioral Genetics: The Clash of Culture and Biology, Ronald Carson and Mark Rothstein bring together well-known experts from the fields of genetics, ethics, neuroscience, psychiatry, sociology, and law to a...

In this heartfelt memoir from one of the youngest recipients of the transorbital lobotamy, Howard Dully shares the story of a painfully dysfunctional childhood, a misspent youth, his struggle to claim the life that was taken from him, and his redemption.At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet some...

Accomplished physician and researcher Dr. Lewis Cohen writes the untold story of two Massachusetts nurses, their struggles with end of life care, and how they were accused of murdering a patient. Captivating and powerful, No Good Deed explores what happens when decisions about end of life issues and the purpose of modern medicine move from the hospital to the courtroom to the church.Where is the line between compassionate palliative care and a criminal act?A W...

Over the last twenty-five years, medicine and consumerism have been on an unchecked collision course, but, until now, the fallout from their impact has yet to be fully uncovered. A writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, Carl Elliott ventures into the uncharted dark side of medicine, shining a light on the series of social and legislative changes that have sacrificed old-style doctoring to the values of consumer capitalism. Along the way, he introduce...

Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues.First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal—putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy?A second set of issues...

On May 13-15, 1982, some 50 scientists and scholars - physicians, philos ophers and social scientists - convened at Hasselby Castle in Stockholm for the first Nordic Symposium on the Philosophy of Medicine. The topics for the symposium included (1) the concepts of health and disease, (2) classification in medicine, and (3) causality and causal explanations in medicine. The majority of the participants were Scandinavian but the symposium was also able to welcome four distinguished guests fr...

Since the first fertilization of a human egg in the laboratory in 1968, scientific and technological breakthroughs have raised ethical dilemmas and generated policy controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. Embryo, stem cell, and cloning research have provoked impassioned political debate about their religious, moral, legal, and practical implications. National governments make rules that govern the creation, destruction, and use of embryos in the laboratory—but they do...

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Native community took on the local hospital, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, provincial and federal ministries of health and national media,...

How should we attempt to resolve concrete bioethical problems? How are we to understand the role of bioethics in the health care system, government, and academe? This collection of original essays raises these and other questions about the nature of bioethics as a discipline. The contributors to the volume discuss various approaches to bioethical thinking and the political and institutional contexts of bioethics, addressing underlying concerns about the purposes of its practice. Included a...

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body.One Body begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the genera...