Untoward injuries are unacceptably common in medical treatment, at times with tragic consequences for patients. The phrases 'an epidemic of error' and 'the medical toll' have been coined to describe this problem of 'iatrogenic harm', which it has been suggested may have contributed to 98,000 deaths per year in the US. Some of these incidents are the result of negligence on the part of doctors, but more usually they are no more than inevitable concomitants of the complexity of modern healthcare. (...) This book is fundamentally about distinguishing the former from the latter. Although medicine is used as the book's primary example, the points made apply equally to aviation, industrial activities, and many other fields of human endeavour. The book advocates a more informed alternative to the blaming culture which has increasingly come to dominate our response to accidents, whether in the medical field or elsewhere. (shrink)

There can be no disputing the proposition that doctors and nurses should be held accountable for their professional activities. In most circumstances this accountability should be achieved through appropriate and effective complaints and disciplinary procedures, but there will be cases where the criminal law should become involved. The criminal law, however, is a serious weapon, and should only be used to punish those whose conduct is truly criminal; it should not be used against those who have merely made a human (...) error. The task of the law should therefore be to identify those situations where a doctor or nurse has behaved in a way which demonstrates a criminally culpable state of mind. In NZ recently the law has failed to do this and has been used as a weapon against those who may be in no sense morally blameworthy. -/- In New Zealand recently the law has failed to do this and has been used as a weapon against those who may be in no sense morally blameworthy. In this respect, NZ has been out of step with other comparable jurisdictions and has demonstrably failed to distinguish between cases where death is caused accidentally (through the making of an ordinary human error) and cases where it is caused criminally (through recklessness or culpable negligence). This is a surprising situation in a jurisdiction which has prided itself on its willingness to adopt a reformist legal agenda. (shrink)

'Working Memory, Thought, and Action' is the magnum opus of one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the past 50 years. This new volume on the model he created discusses the developments that have occurred within the model in the past twenty years, and places it within a broader context.

Determining appropriate legal responses to the conduct of health care workers who endanger patients continues to provoke fierce debate. This is particularly true in the context of criminal law, which offers punishment as an obvious strategy. In the first of three papers which make up this issue's extended Health Care Law feature, Professor Alexander McCall Smith and Dr Alan Merry argue against the prosecution of health care workers except in circumstances where there is very dear evidence of a (...) culpable frame of mind. They do so against the backdrop of their description of proposed changes in New Zealand legislation on medical manslaughter. The catalyst for this change was a judge's refusal to countenance the prosecution of an anaesthetist for manslaughter for inadvertent error. In the authors' opinion the intervention by the New Zealand judge has given rise to a long overdue review of a harsh penal measure. However, in a commentary on McCall Smith and Merry's paper, Ron Paterson argues that all is not what it seems and that--in the light of New Zealand's 'no fault' system of compensation for medical accident--the present system should be maintained. (shrink)

Guest editorial Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s10698-012-9147-z Authors Alan Chalmers, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Journal Foundations of Chemistry Online ISSN 1572-8463 Print ISSN 1386-4238.

Nicolas Coldstream was a tall but not lofty person. His manner indeed was that of a quiet and thoughtful member of the old-school type, and this certainly was occasionally misinterpreted. Coldstream tended to couch his disagreements in terms well known from the Yes Minister repertoire: ‘I am not quite sure that I can follow you completely on that’. His deliberate and seemingly at times slow responses were however always to the point, and couched in readily understandable terms; his students always (...) valued the meticulous detail that he could bring to their work, as he did in his publications. Academically Coldstream concentrated on the essentials of gathering physical evidence and interpreting them in historical terms, be they art-historical or broadly political. He regarded both his basic books, Greek Geometric Pottery: a Survey of Ten Local Styles and their Chronology and Geometric Greece as historical contributions; certainly nobody working in the field can afford to ignore either. (shrink)

As a young lecturer in philosophy and the eldest son of a prominent Jewish family, Alan Montefiore faced two very different understandings of his identity: the more traditional view that an identity such as his carried with it, as a matter of given fact, certain duties and obligations, and an opposing view, emphasized by his studies in philosophy, according to which there can be no rationally compelling move from statements of fact—whatever the alleged facts may be—to "judgments of value." (...) According to this second view, individuals must in the end take responsibility for determining their own values and obligations. In this book, Montefiore looks back on his attempts to understand the nature of this conflict and the misunderstandings it may engender. In the process, he illustrates through personal experience the practical implications of a characteristically philosophical issue. Montefiore finally settles on the following: while everyone has to accept that facts, including those of their own situation, are whatever they may be, both the "traditional" assumption that individuals must recognize certain values and obligations as rooted in those very facts, and the contrary view that individuals are ultimately responsible for determining their own values, are deeply embedded in differing conceptions of society and its relation to its members. Montefiore then examines the misunderstandings between those for whom identity constitutes in effect a conceptual bridge connecting the facts of who and what a person may be to the value commitments incumbent upon them, and those for whom the very idea of such a bridge can be nothing but a confusion. Using key examples from the notoriously vexed case of Jewish identity and from his own encounters with its conflicting meanings and implications, Montefiore depicts the practical significance of the differences between these worldviews, particularly for those who hove to negotiate them. (shrink)

O texto investiga algumas dimensões do pensamento de Levinas em relação aos temas da linguagem, justiça, perdão e pluralidade, entre outros, a partir da leitura talmúdica “Envers Autrui”, estabelecendo relações com alguns aspectos da filosofia analítica e do pensamento do Kant e William Galston.

Over 100 years ago, Frances Galton began the empirical study of autobiographical memory by devising a technique in which he explored the capacity for a cue word to elicit the recollection of events from earlier life (Galton, 1883). After a century of neglect, the topic began to re-emerge, stimulated by the work of Robinson (1976) using the technique on groups of normal subjects, by Crovitz’s work on its application to patients with memory deficits (Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974), and by the (...) detailed diary study of her own autobiographical memory carried out by Marigold Linton (Linton, 1975). This early wave of interest was focused by Rubin’s edited book on the topic (Rubin, 1986) which captured a broad and growing interest in autobiographical memory. This trend was reflected very strongly in the submissions to the second conference on Practical Aspects of Memory, in which the study of autobiographical memory represented one of the major strands (Gruneberg, Morris & Sykes, 1988), featuring prominently in both the opening and concluding addresses (Baddeley, 1988; Neisser, 1988). (shrink)

John Ziman's 'open-ended essay', searching, as much of his work does, for 'the grounds of belief in science' covers such a range of disciplines and topics in a serious and engaging way that it is difficult to single out which parts to address. At the end he suggests that 'if you think that I have got it all wrong in your particular speciality, please do weigh in and tell us all how things really are over there'. In my case, in (...) the disciplines of history and anthropology, there is no need to do so. While specialists might disagree with certain interpretations, or complain that complex debates have been over-simplified, I think that most would agree with Ziman's central arguments. (shrink)

Theology as a science reflects the phenomena that in some way constitute the experience of faith in society, that is, looking at the world and the various periods of history with the help of the various sciences: anthropology, the sciences of religion and sociology. With the black traffic of the African continent, came the various customs lived in Africa: culture, religiosity, African myths, beliefs in the Orixás, all these elements constituted the Brazilian cultural imaginary. Thus syncretism arises as a form (...) of resistance and survival of faith. The Church with the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar declarations opens a new way of being in the world, valuing dialogue with other religions and cultures. (shrink)

BL With revised Latin text and English translationBL New historical notes and rewritten Introduction Columba is one of the best-known saints of the early Celtic church; through his foundation of the abbey of Iona he had a far-reaching influence on medieval Christianity. In about 700, a century after his death, the Life of Columba was written by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona. It has long been valued as the major primary source on the subject, for the light it throws on (...) early medieval Scotland and Ireland, and as an important work of literature. The 1961 edition of the Life, by Alan and Marjorie Anderson, has long been unavailable. Marjorie Anderson has now revised both the Latin text and the English translation, provided new historical notes, and rewritten the Introduction to take account of recent work in the area. This new edition of a source indispensable for the study of the early medieval church meets a major scholarly need. (shrink)