The most recommended medical ethics books

Professor and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman’s The Soul of Care movingly explicates the practical, emotional, and moral aspects of caregiving. Based on Kleinman’s experiences as the primary caregiver for his late wife Joan after she developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, this book skillfully reveals caregiving – however grueling, however much about enduring the unendurable – as resonating with emotional, moral, and, for many, religious meaning, and ultimately enabling us to realize our humanity most fully. Moreover, inspired by the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kleinman poignantly argues for the importance of recognizing care as a basic human right.

Jenna Fox wakes from a year-long coma after a terrible accident and tries to figure out who she is now. This is a book with futuristic medicine and technology, but the feelings and emotions are universal. Jenna’s struggle to find out the truth about her past, and her place in the present make this one of my very favorite books, which I’ve read and reread many times.

Like Pellegrino, Daniel (Dan) Callahan is also one of the forefathers of the field of medical ethics. 

A prolific author, Dan published 47 books and some 800 articles and blogs. Dan is also the co-founder of the Hastings Center in New York, one of the leading research centers on medical ethics in the world. In many ways, his vision established medical ethics as a legitimate field of studies.

In Setting Limits, Callahan suggests the concept of a “full biographical life span,” meaning the point at which it can be said that a person has lived a complete, fulfilling, whole life. He does not determine a specific age but suggests a range — late seventies, early eighties, which in his opinion is equivalent to a natural, complete life cycle. 

Callahan claims that today medical technology can extend life beyond the point that he believes is sensible and worthwhile. He deliberates… show more.

This is an unsettling, deeply disturbing book. I put it on my list because I worked with Bob Lifton (Robert Jay Lifton) in a tutorial for 2 years at Yale. He was a student of unthinkable disasters, atrocities (Hiroshima, Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism, Nazi Doctors to name a few). For over two years, we met together regularly to discuss and try to understand what was happening in contemporary American culture, and how it was changing during the late 1960s, particularly among young people. We talked about political unrest, the Vietnam war and the Bobby Seale Black Panther trial in New Haven, the student strike and the May Day, 1970 rally, including memorable appearances by the Chicago Seven, thousands of Panther supporters, and observed by the 82nd Airborne Division. He, and his book, helped me sort out how unthinkable things could happen, and he helped me come… show more.

The book brings together two contradictory viewpoints.

While Jackson argues that we should legalise assisted suicide in order to enable ‘good death’ and honour patients’ wishes, Keown opposes such a legislation, thinking that voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are gravely unethical and what we need to do is to improve care, not to offer death.

This is an excellent exchange of ideas that I have used in my classes on end-of-life concerns.

John Keown and I meet in Washington every once and a while. Although we disagree on whether physician-assisted suicide should be offered, we agree on the need to preserve the dignity of the person as well as on many other fundamental issues.

I greatly appreciate John’s scholarship.

This series of essays by a humane physician-historian who first attracted me to medical history examines basic ideas in medicine across centuries and cultures. Published when the author was almost a hundred, it raises important questions about medical ethics and the place of medicine in society from the Greeks onwards.

In 1991, Dworkin taught at Oxford a seminar titled “Abortion, Euthanasia and Dementia”.

Until then, I never paid too much attention to these subjects, not more than any lay person with general knowledge. I attended the seminar simply because Dworkin delivered it.

This was the most interesting and thought-provoking seminar I have ever attended in my life. It opened my interest in medical ethics, a field that is still one of my preoccupations.

Dworkin was writing at that time Life’s Dominion. Each week he would circulate a chapter of his book, to be discussed in the following week.

We were some twelve students in class; each of us read and commented on the chapters. There was a very lively exchange and fierce debates.

Again, while I disagreed with some of Dworkin’s arguments, I could not but appreciate the force of his reasoning. After that seminar, I decided to embark… show more.

There are a lot of critics of the biopharmaceutical industry who belittle the contributions of this industry by accusing it of overselling the value of new medicines, underselling safety, and having numerous conflicts of interest with academic researchers.

This book details the importance of collaborations between doctors and industry for the development of new drugs. For anyone involved in pharmaceutical R&D, it is refreshing to read accounts about successful interactions that lead to breakthroughs.

Rather than look at healthcare as “good guys vs. bad guys,” this book gives great examples of partnerships that result in saving lives.

Kassirer, also like Angell a highly respected physician and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, first opened my eyes to how extensively drug companies use their vast wealth to turn physicians into promoters and middlemen.

I knew about the small and not-so-small gifts, speaking fees, travel junkets, and the like to individual doctors and “key opinion leaders” of the profession, but not about the “institutional conflicts of interest” gladly entered into by specialty medical societies heavily dependent on drug money for their events and activities such as scientific meetings, journal publishing, clinical practice recommendations, and, not least “continuing medical education” required by law for license maintenance.

Although Kassirer, also like Angell, proposed reforms, from what I know about conditions today, not much has changed, so On the Take remains an indispensable window into corrupted medicine. 

A lot of books by Herman Koch deal with the failures of adulthood and the inexplainable violence of men (i.e., The Dinner).

However, Summer House with Swimming Pool is littered with masculine rage and revenge as the story takes you through a doctor’s recount of the summer that changes his life – and how that affects his future procedures.

The complexity of emotion written into Dr. Marc Schlosser’s character is quite a feat, as well as the sharp dry humor throughout the book that deals with serious dark topics.