GIFTS

We acknowledge with gratitude the following gifts:
From The Hastings Center, 255 Elm Road, Briarcliff Manor, NY:
1. Grubb A (Ed.):Choices and decisions in health careJohn Wiley & Sons, Chichester. 1993.

(The book includes chapters on Islamic medical ethics, euthanasia, the persistent vegetative state and ethics in medical research.)

2. Levine C:Taking sides: Clashing views on controversial bioethical issuesThe Dushkin Publishing Group Inc., Guilford, Connecticut. 1984. (Part one of the book deals with choices in reproduction, part two with issues relating to death, part three with treatment of the mentally ill and part four with human and animal experimentation. Seventeen issues are discussed, each by two authors, one of whom argues ‘Yes’ and the other ‘No’. Postscripts round off the discussion.)

3. Dunning AJ (Chairman):Choices in health careA report by the Government Committee on choices in health care, The Netherlands. 1992. (As the title suggests, the committee deals with the compulsions that force us to choose who should receive ‘particular types of health care, individual responsibility towards society, rights and priorities, rationing, innovation, appropriate care and recommendations made by the committee.)

4. The following issues of journals:

a)The Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy1991; 7: 1- 448. (This special issue dedicated to Dr. Josephine King includes papers on the patient’s right to decline treatment, Dr. Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments and factors associated with medical malpractice.)

b)Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics1993 :2:397-564. (This issue contains a special section on ethics consultants and consultations. It also contains some responses on euthanasia.)

c)American Journal of Law and Medicine1993; XIX: 187-367. (Published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics, this issue includes papers on reproductive autonomy in married and unmarried women.)

d)Health Affairs1994; 13:7-279. (This issue includes papers on the pharmaceutical industry and health reform, the regulation of drugs and devices and criteria for standard vs experimental therapy .)

e)Journal of Medical Ethics1993; 19:195-256. This issue includes an editorial on autonomy, a symposium on ethics and clinical trials and papers on decisions on ‘not to resuscitate’ and whether nurses should remain under the authority of the physician.)

f)HEC Forum1994;6:73-126 (Published by HealthCare Ethics Committee Forum, the journal focusses on various aspects of the functioning of ethics committees in hospitals.)

g)Bioethics1994;8:191-292. (This special issue discusses various aspects of advance declarations, especially as they pertain to life-sustaining treatment. Dr. Hilde Nelson’s paper on ‘Postmortem pregnancy’ - sustaining the pregnancies of brain dead women in the second or third trimester, also deserves attention.)

h)Medico-legal Journal1994;62:97- 160. (This issue contains, among other papers, one on why opinions on the effects of health care are so often wrong.)

i)Social Responsibility: Business, Journalism, Law, Medicine 1994;XX:5-80. (This issue contains lectures delivered at Washington and Lee University during 1993-1994. The first of these discusses money and manipulation in the media. It asks whether the line that journalists would not, traditionally, cross has moved or become dotted. The third essay discusses AIDS as a mirror of ourselves, revealing many destructive prejudices.)

j)Stanford Law Review1993;46: l234. (The first paper ‘From science to evidence’ discusses trials on Bendectin - a drug that caused birth defects in children born of mothers on this drug.)

k )IRB- a review of human subjects research 1994; 16: l-24. (Published by The Hastings Center, it features, among other essays, one on whether trnsplantation of cells to patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy are ethical.)

l)The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics1994;22: l-93. (Among other topics this issue features expert witnesses, euthanasia and wrongful birth. The latter refers to birth of a child with congenital illness or abnormality where the parents had not been informed of this possibility by the treating prenatal physician.)

m)New Titles in Bioethics1994;2O: l-18 (A classified bibliography of recent books in this field.)

n)Hastings Center Report1992-l994, Volumes 22-24.

3) Photocopies of several key papers on biomedical ethics. We are especially obliged to Dr. Daniel Callahan and his team at The Hastings Center for these generous gifts.

World Health Organisation Library, Geneva

1. Howard-Jones N, Bankowski Z:Medical experimentation and the protection of human rightsCouncil for Intenational Organisations of Medical Sciences and The Sandoz Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Issues, Geneva. 1979.

2. Curran WJ, Shapiro ED:Law, medicine and forensic scienceThird edition. Little, Brown and Co., Boston. 1982.

3. Brody EB:Biomedical technology and human rights. UNESCO, Paris. 1993.

From Dr. K. W. M. Fulford, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, England

Fulford KWM:Moral theory and medical practiceCambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1989.

From Dr. Aneel N. Patel, 501 Lakeshore Drive, Goldsboro, N. Carolina, USA

Kolatta G:The baby doctors. Probing the limits of fetal medicine Delacorte Press, New York. 1990.

From Dr. Bindu T. Desai, 28 Park Avenue, Madisonville, Kentucky, USA

Currey R:Medicine for sale. Commercialism vs. Professionalism Whittle Direct Books, Knoxville, Tenn. 1992.

From Dr. Jorgen Cohn, Department of Pediatrics, University of Tromso, Norway

Cohn J, Eitinger L, Kemp Genefke I, Vesti P (Eds.): Torture and the medical profession.Journal of Medical Ethics1991;17: Supplement l-64.

From The Henry L Kaiser Family Foundation

White KL: The task of medicine. Dialogue at Wickenburg The Henry J. Kaiser Family Goundation, Menlo Park, California. 1988.

Points to ponder

Is absolute honesty always a virtue? In human affairs, crass honesty may not always be the cardinal virtue. Truth must, and often should, yield to discretion,kindness and compassion in the usually irrational realm of human affairs. Naked, sheer honesty as applied to such tricky issues as human values, ethics and human good suffers from the difficulty of discerning, in the human world of noncommensurate values, what truth really is. It may be hard to differentiate honesty of the heart from honesty of the word.

D Carleton Gadjusek,Scientific responsibility. In: Fujiki N, Mater D (Eds.) Human genome research and society. Proceedings of the Second International Bioethics Semniar. Eubios Ethics Institute, Fukui, Japan. 1992. Pages 205-210.