Advances in medicine have brought us the stethoscope, artificial kidneys, and computerized health records. They have also changed the doctor-patient relationship. This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created and how we respond to the problems and successes of their use. Stanley Joel Reiser, MD, walks us through the ways medical innovations exert their influence by discussing a number of selected technologies, including the X-ray, ultrasound, and respirator. Reiser creates a new understanding of thinking about how (...) health care is practiced in the United States and thereby suggests new methods to effectively meet the challenges of living with technological medicine. As healthcare reform continues to be an intensely debated topic in America, Technological Medicine shows us the pros and cons of applying technological solutions health and illness. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

A variety of cases of scientific misconduct have been documented since the 1980s among biological scientists. These cases have focused the attention of the public and scientific community on this behavior and made it the centerpiece of the concern about ethics in the biological sciences. In contrast, the ethics movement in clinical medicine, which arose in the 1960s, was not basically directed at the problems of wrong-doing. Instead it concentrated on the difficult ethical choices that had to be made In (...) the practice of medicine.In this essay, I discuss the two movements. The attention given to misconduct In the biological sciences has become excessive and diverts its ethics movement from exploring and teaching about the difficult ethical decisions scientists must make in weighing obligations to self, science, and society. A more balanced and selective approach to developing an ethical framework in the biological sciences is needed. (shrink)

Throughout the world, research ethics committees are relied on to prevent unethical research and protect research subjects. Given that reliance, the composition of committees and the manner in which decisions are arrived at by committee members is of critical importance. There have been Instances in which an inadequate review process has resulted in serious harm to research subjects. Deficient committee review was identified as one of the factors In a study in New Zealand which resulted in the suffering and death (...) of many women diagnosed with carcinoma in situ. (shrink)

Biological scientists, like scientists in other disciplines, are uncertain about whether or how to use their knowledge and time to provide society with insight and guidance in handling the effects of inventions and discoveries. This article addresses this issue. It presents a typography of structures in which scientists may contribute to social understanding and decisions. It describes the different ways in which these contributions can be made. Finally it develops the ethical arguments that justify the view that biological scientists have (...) social responsibilities. (shrink)

Reflections about the role of human choice in determining personal health occur in the writings of practitioners and laymen throughout history. The Greek and Roman writers emphasized the effect of life's activities. During the Middle Ages and Renaisance, disease continued to be seen as a consequence of disorder of the bodily humors, which were under the individual's control. The rise of the paternalistic national regimes in Europe produced the view that society had the responsibility to maintain health. Jacksonian egalitarianism led (...) to a reaction against the agressive therapies of established professional experts, a view furthered by the Thomsonian belief that people should wrest control of their health away from orthodox physicians. Among the twentieth century reactions was the movement to urge people to have doctors evaluate laypersons' health. By the 1970s a movement emerged emphasizing again personal responsibility, which, in turn, produced a concern that this was merely "victim-blaming". Views on the role of lay people in determining personal health are heavily influenced by prevailing social, political, and moral climates. Keywords: "responsibility for health: social, personal, or professional?", "causes of illness", "self-reliant health care", historical influences, responsibility for health, "victim-blaming" CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Institutions have ethical lives and characters just as their individual members do. Health care organizations must look critically at how professed institutional values can best be realized in day‐to‐day interactions within the institution and with the wider community.

Time, space and matter are the most pervasive and inescapable aspects of the physical universe. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that they represent the most fundamental and ubiquitous characteristics of reality, they have always presented elements of mystery to the human mind. Thus on the level of common thought we ponder how the withering hand of time reaches from out the past into the future to bring decay and destruction to all things; and on the more sophisticated level, after the (...) fashion of Immanuel Kant, we are puzzled by certain antinomies of thought concerning the necessity for an origin, and an end, of the universe in time and space, in the face of the equally necessary reasons for regarding the universe as being unlimited in its space and time dimensions. In either case, however, we are paying tribute to the tantalizing nature of these problems concerning the cosmic framework of space-time-matter in which we live, and move, and have our being. Indeed, it is not too much to say that genuine philosophy took its origin in Zeno's paradoxes of motion, and will have its final consummation when it solves Kant's antinomies. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

Divided Staffs, Divided Selves offers a case-centered approach to the teaching of health care ethics to a wide range of students and clinicians. The book provides both clinical case material and a method for engaging in a dialogue regarding difficult decisions in the mental health care field that have potentially tragic choices. The essays that introduce the volume place the ethical problems of treating mentally ill people in the context of the health care ethics movement and traditions of ethical decision (...) making. The individual cases are real, derived from actual clinical and consultative experiences. (shrink)

Although Freud launches a devastating critique of religion, he makes significant contributions to religious maturity. On the “manifest” level, he attacks religion as illusion; on the “latent” level, however, he is preoccupied with religion as mystery deep in the psyche. This difference is between religion as “critical” or as “postcritical” (Polanyi)—as dualistically split from, or emergent within, the psyche. Postcritical religion appears in Freud as mystery, unity, feeling, meaning, and creative agency. We see why, for Freud, the mother as matrix (...) keeps disappearing and what religious maturity is for “honest smallholders on this earth” who live within matrix as mystery. (shrink)

Man is by nature a creature who is curious. He must have theories and explanations. He wants to understand why there is a universe; and he wants to know what kind of a universe it is that he inhabits. Primitive man has his myths about the origins of things, and the modern scientists have their latest speculations about the universe. And of the making of cosmological hypotheses there is no end.