The Journal of medicine and philosophy
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The nature and limits of the physician's professional responsibilities constitute core topics in clinical ethics. These responsibilities originate in the physician's professional role, which was first examined in the modern English-language literature of medical ethics by two eighteenth-century British physician-ethicists, John Gregory and Thomas Percival. The papers in this annual clinical ethics number of the Journal explore the physician's professional responsibilities in the areas of surgical ethics, matters of conscience, and managed care.
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In recent years, a number of writers have proposed voluntary stopping of eating and drinking as an alternative to physician-assisted suicide. This paper calls attention to and discusses some of the ethical complications that surround the practice of voluntary stopping of eating and drinking. The paper argues that voluntary stopping of eating and drinking raises very difficult ethical questions. These questions center on the moral responsibility of clinicians who care for the terminally ill as well as the nature and limits of the authority they exercise over them.
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E. Haavi Morreim's book, Holding Health Care Accountable, insightfully describes several features of the current crisis in malpractice in relation to the health care marketplace. In this essay, I delineate the key and eminently practical guide for reform that she lays out. ⋯ The gifts of medicine cannot be reduced to the immanent medical economy, and any attempt to do so results in crisis. A health care that points to finitude and fallibility is one that points to the mystery of human existence and mortality. Any health care financing system that helps to delineate finitude--both epistemological and existential--is one that will give patients a new lease on living and dying.