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In Nelson's typically inviting and graceful style, the essays collected in Hippocrates' Maze explore the labyrinth of contemporary health care, and arrive at some unusual findings about death and decisionmaking, justice and families, cloning and kinship, and organ donation and intimacy. However, the book's most distinctive conclusions concern bioethics itself: the field is not best seen solely as a source of good advice to doctors, but rather as a way of better understanding our humanity.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 The Meaning of the Act: Relationship, Meaning and Identity in Prenatal Genetic Screening Chapter 3 Agency by Proxy Chapter 4 Just Expectations: Family Caregivers, Practical Identities and Social Justice in the Provision of Health Care Chapter 5 Death's Gender Chapter 6 'Everything Includes Itself in Power:' Power, Theory and the Foundations of Bioethics Chapter 7 A Duty to Donate? Selves, Societies and Organ Procurement Chapter 8 Cloning, Families, and the Reproduction of Persons
About the author
James Lindemann Nelson is professor of philosophy and faculty associate at the Michigan State University's Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. He is co-author of The Patient in the Family (1996) and Alzheimer's: Answers to Hard Questions for Families (1996).
Summary
This work seeks a new way to get through Hippocrates' Maze. It suggests an alternative to "applied ethics", which draws theories from moral philosophy into the world of the practitioner.
