Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Mark G Kuczewski and Rosa Lynn B Pinkus, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 1999, 219 pages, £17.25, $23.95.
In spite of the stress on evidence and audit, clinicians still talk to each other mostly about cases, especially when there are difficulties. So when they come to consider problems in medical ethics, the focus is on case presentation too. However learned the participants, ethical analysis in medicine without cases feels like an egg without salt. Yet the oddity remains that case discussion is often done very badly; new tales are thrown in on a “me too” basis without any apparent questioning about why a second one will help when we haven't got far down the road on sorting out the first. It's not surprising therefore that some still dismiss these discussions as “mere anecdote”, or that there is a continuing critical literature (initiated in part in this journal) about the use and value of the genre itself. This ambivalence must be part of the explanation as …
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- The “four quadrants” approach to clinical ethics case analysis; an application and review
- Complex challenges for patients with protracted incurable cancer: an ethnographic study in a comprehensive cancer centre in the Netherlands
- ‘Written of by novelists’: scripting and managing emotions in 19th-century medical manuscripts
- Guidelines spell out when someone assisting a suicide risks prosecution
- Rigorous assessment of palliative care revisited
- HIV status: the prima facie right not to know the result
- Assistance in dying for older people without a serious medical condition who have a wish to die: a national cross-sectional survey
- The wish to die and hastening death in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A scoping review
- Friendship during patients’ stable and unstable phases of incurable cancer: a qualitative interview study
- Lessons from Frankenstein: narrative myth as ethical model