By David Hunter I recently finished reading Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger a medical historian and ethicist (although she may deny the title) and since I found it both thought provoking, terrifying and inspiring I thought I would share a few thoughts and hopefully convince you to read it, since I think some of […]
Category: Book review
Book Review: Kevin Yuill, “Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization”
Basingstoke/ New York: Plagrave Macmillan, 2013; 188+xx pp Can there be anything new to say on the subject of assisted death of one form or another? One acquaintance of mine has suggested that there ought to be a five-year moratorium on papers about it, on the grounds that there almost certainly isn’t. At the very […]
Book Review: Tom Koch, “Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012; 352 + xx pp Guest Post by Robert Rivers (PhD student, Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program, University of British Columbia) Who benefits presenting scarcity as a natural state in health care? Who killed the Hippocratic Oath? Why are doctors portrayed as paternalistic? Why has patient care become a secondary concern to […]
Passive Euthanasia: A Cri de Cœur
Don’t worry: this isn’t another instance of me yammering on about the right to die or the right to induce death. I’ve recently received a parcel; it contained a copy of this book by Leanne Bell, which happened to fall open at p 204. On that page, you’ll find this passage: Active euthanasia involves a deliberate act […]
Book Review: Nie Jingbao, “Medical Ethics in China”
London: Routledge, 2011; 263 + xiii pp Guest Post by Yonghui Ma For those who have a particular interest in cross-cultural bioethics, Nie’s book, Medical Ethics in China, is an absolute feast. Luckily, I am one of them and it more than satisfied my appetite for the subject. It brings us much closer to a fascinating […]
Henrietta Lacks and “Enchanting Rhetoric”
Note: There’s a couple of errors of interpretation in this post. I’m not going to re-write it, because I wrote what I wrote, and it’s in the public domain, and I don’t think it’s all that dignified to pretend that one never makes blunders; it’s better to acknowledge them, take the hit, and move on. […]
Book Review: John Gray, “The Immortalization Commission”
London: Allen Lane, 2011; 276 + xii pp If some people are to be believed – not least certain former JME editors – saving lives is a duty that doesn’t stop with children drowning in ponds: it extends to there being a moral obligation to pursue scientific research so that death can be actively avoided […]
Book Review: Pascal Bruckner, “Perpetual Euphoria”
Woodstock: Princeton UP, 2010; 244 + xii pp This has to be one of the most French books I’ve ever read. Pascal Bruckner has written a whole book taking aim at happiness – a kind of obtuseness that is, on the face of it, the preserve of a particular kind of Gallic writer – and “the […]
Book Review: Norman Cantor, “After We Die”
Washington DC: Georgetown UP, 2010; 372+x pp “Here’s the story; it starts at the end,” says the dead narrator at the beginning of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World. It’s a bit of a cliche to say that the dead have stories to tell, but they do have stories to be told about them. Among them […]
Book Review: Singer & Viens (eds.), “The Cambridge Textbook of Bioethics”
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009; 538+xv pp £40, pb A couple of months ago, Cambridge UP tried to post a cheeky advert for this book in the comments to one of the posts on this site. I sabotaged the link, but offered to restore it in return for a freebie, which CUP asked me to review. […]