| Description |
Loewy's Textbook of Healthcare Ethics is one of the very few books that is better than its title. It is a textbook; it does address ethics; and it does survey a broad range of issues in health care. Of course it includes the usual theoretical rubrics like autonomy and responsibility, physician/patient relationships, and macroand microallocation; specific topics like advance directives, organ donations, AIDS, no-code orders, physician-assisted suicide; and broad surveys within a subfield, such as the whole range of reproductive issues. But it also addresses some questions rarely confronted in bioethics texts: for example, there is a chapter (up front, where it belongs) on fallibility and the problem of blameworthiness in medicine, identifying hypocrisy as a central problem in ethics. For the institution of medicine, this is a heady challenge. Furthermore, this book's style is not quite like ordinary textbooks. It is more sophisticated and more assertive: rather than analyze issues at length, it provides an often provocative view of the issues, inviting the student to take issue with the content rather than babying the student through an artificially evenhanded discussion. This textbook is pithy, comprehensive, and interesting, unlike some books with flashier titles, and would be an excellent book for discussion-based classroom use. |
