Guest post by Dominic Wilkinson (Cross-posted from Practical Ethics) Mary is 62 years old. She is brought to hospital after she collapsed suddenly at home. Her neighbour found her unconscious, and called the ambulance. When they arrived she was deeply unconscious and at risk of choking on her own secretions. They put a breathing tube […]
Category: Life and Death
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. […]
Nothing to lose? Killing is disabling
Guest post by Dominic Wilkinson (Cross-posted from Practical Ethics) In a provocative article forthcoming in the Journal of Medical Ethics (one of a new series of feature articles in the journal) philosophers Walter Sinnott Armstrong and Franklin Miller ask ‘what makes killing wrong?’ Their simple and intuitively appealing answer is that killing is wrong because […]
Suffering and the Human Condition
I’m currently working my way through the recently-released report by the Commission on Assisted Dying – it’s a long and appropriately life-sapping document, but a number of commentators has been quicker than I to get through it. Douglas Noble, writing at the BMJ blog, isn’t impressed. Based on what I’ve read so far, I’m tempted […]
A Conscience Clause with Claws
There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here. […]
Personhood in Mississippi
Phew, I thought, when I heard that Measure 26, the proposal to redefine “personhood” to cover the unborn, had been thrown out by the electorate of Mississippi. To catch up: the prosaically-named piece of legislation would have amend[ed] the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of […]
Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10. Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16 […]
C-Sections on Demand? Not Quite…
Stephen Latham has picked up a lead about NICE guidelines on the provision of caesarian sections: An update of a new guidance document being developed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellenct (“NICE”) would permit caesarian section on maternal request, even when there are no medical indications for the procedure. […] The new […]
Public Lecture: Mary Midgley on Death and the Human Animal
Via the Centre for Medical Humanities blog: Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture Mary Midgley – Newcastle University Death and the Human Animal Wednesday 19th October 2011, 5pm – 7pm (freshments available from 5pm) The Henry Dyson room, the college of St Hild and St Bede, Durham. The abstract’s below the fold. […]
Assisted Suicide and the Courts: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
“Martin”‘s story has been generating a reasonable amount of media and blog attention over the lat few days. (Udo Schuklenk considers some of the Telegraph‘s coverage, for example, and finds it severely wanting.) Paralysed after a stroke, “Martin” wants help to end his life; but his wife doesn’t want to be the one to help […]