Bøger i Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society serien

The primary objective of The Health Care Ethics Con sultant is to focus attention on an immediate practical problem: the role and responsibilities, the education and training, and the certification and accreditation of health care ethics consultants.

Who is to count as a person? What exactly is "personhood"? Is a "person" the same as a "human being"? These are probably the most crucial and complex questions at the heart of today's ethics.

There is the world of ideas and the world of practice; Concomitantly, those institutions involved in training peo- ple in clinical ethics have added organized exposure to the world of practice , in the form of placement requirements, to the normal academic course load.

Many of the demands being voiced for a "humanizing" of health care center on the public's concern that they have some say In determining what happens to the individual in health care institutions.

These essays are not simply a collection, but were developed from a single conception of the four ethical concerns of trans plan tation described in the first chapter. We have made room for, and indeed have invited, different and sometimes conflicting points of view on the complicated ethical ques- tions raised by transplant operations.

Caplan It is commonly said, especially when the subject is assisted reproduction, that medical technology has out- stripped our morality. Nor is it entirely accurate to describe assisted repro- duction as technology. It is technique, more than technology, that dominates the field of assisted reproduction.

The Direction of Medical Ethics The direction bioethics, and specifically medical ethics, will take in the next few years will be crucial.

Women have been the objects of scientific and ethical discussions about reproductive freedom and its control for over a century. In this book, women themselves raise critical questions about the ethics, the scientific nature, and the social context of these developments.

The events in Bloomington became the catalyst for action by the Reagan administration, the courts, and Congress that culminated in a federal policy that makes failure to treat newborns with disabilities a form of child neglect. This book centers on the public policy aspects of withholding treatment from critically ill newborns who are disabled.

Suppose an accountant discovers evidence of shady practices while ex- amining the books of a client. Suppose a physician discov- ers that a patient, a bus driver, has a weak heart. If the patient contin- ues bus driving even after being informed of the heart condition, should the physician inform the driver's company?

People of Socrates' time were frequently aghast at the questions he would ask. Phi- losophers have always asked peculiar questions most other people would never dream of asking, convinced as the latter are that the answers were settled long ago in the collective "wisdom" of society, including ques- tions about woman: should women be educated?

In the early 1970s, well before the field ofbioethics had established itself in medicine or anywhere else, the Hastings Center organized a small meeting of law school professors.

The Project on Reproductive Laws for the 1990s began in 1985 with the realization that reports of scientific developments and new technologies were stimulating debates and discussions among bioethicists and policymakers, and that women had little part in those discussions either as participants or as a group with interests to be considered.

The roles of both the consumer and the health advocate professional have become increasingly significant in to- day's climate of "rationed" health care. Toward such a timely exchange, the first Confer- ence on Advocacy in Health Care was organized by the Health Advocacy Program of Sarah Lawrence College and recently held.

Clearly older people must be protected from in- appropriate research and careful attention must be paid to the circumstances under which research is conducted on those older persons who have given anything less than full consent.

The Aging Self and the Aging Society Ethical issues involving the elderly have recently come to the fore. The aging of society casts into vivid relief a num- ber of deep and troubling questions. We also wonder what responsi- bilities we bear toward aging family members and what expectations of others our plans for old age can reasona- bly include.

Indeed, it seems fair to say that it was not until after the Second World War that the full force of the earlier discoveries in biology and medicine began to have a major impact, an impact that was all the more heightened by the rapid bi omedical developments after the war.

The next three sections concern comparisons between human and nonhuman animals: Section III on the rights and wrongs of killing, Section IV on the humanity of animals and the animality of humans, and Section V on questions of the conflict of human and animal interests.

In When Medicine Went Mad, one of the nation's leading bioethicists-and an extraordinary panel of experts and concentration camp survivors-examine problems first raised by Nazi medical experimentation that remain difficult and relevant even today.