This thought-provoking book explores the connections between health, ethics, and soul. It analyzes how and why the soul has been lost from scientific discourses, healthcare practices, and ethical discussions, presenting suggestions for change. Arguing that the dominant scientific worldview has eradicated talk about the soul and presents an objective and technical approach to human life and its vulnerabilities, Ten Have and Pegoraro look to rediscover identity, humanity, and meaning in healthcare and bioethics. Taking a mulitidisciplinary approach, they investigate philosophical, scientific, historical, cultural, social, religious, economic, and environmental perspectives as they journey toward a new, global bioethics, emphasizing the role of the moral imagination. Bioethics, Healthcare and the Soul is an important read for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in bioethics and person-centred healthcare.

The focus of bioethical debates on exceptional cases neglects the underlying values—like justice and community—that would lend to a broader, more well-rounded understanding of today's world. Discussions of ethical problems in health care too often concentrate on exceptional cases. Bioethical controversies triggered by experimental drugs, gene-edited babies, or life extension are understandably fascinating: they showcase the power of medical science and technology while addressing anxieties concerning health, disease, suffering, and death. However, the focus on rare individual cases in the media spotlight turns attention away from more pressing ethical issues that impact global populations, such as access to health care, safe food and water, and the prevention of emerging infectious diseases. In Bizarre Bioethics, Henk A.M.J. ten Have argues that this focus on bizarre cases leads to bizarre bioethics with a narrow agenda for ethical debate. In other words, although these extreme cases are undeniably real, they present a limited and skewed view of everyday moral reality. This focus also assumes that individuals are rational decision-makers, so that the role of feelings and emotions can be downgraded. Larger questions related to justice, solidarity, community, meaning, and ambiguity are not appreciated. Such questions used to be posed by philosophical and theological traditions, but they have been exorcised and marginalized in the development of bioethics. Science, ten Have writes, is not a value-free endeavor that provides facts and evidence: it is driven by underlying value perspectives that are often based on metaphors and world views from philosophical and theological traditions. Drawing on a rich analysis of the literature, ten Have explains how bioethical discussion can be enriched by these metaphors and develops a broader approach that critically delves into the imaginative world views that determine understanding of the world and human existence. Examining the roles of the metaphors of ghosts, monsters, pilgrims, prophets, and relics, ten Have illustrates how science and medicine are animated by imaginations that fuel the search for hope, salvation, healing, and a predictable future. Bizarre Bioethics invites students, researchers, policymakers and teachers interested in ethics and health care to think about the value perspectives on health and disease today.

Bizarre Bioethics invites students, researchers, policymakers and teachers interested in ethics and health care to think about the value perspectives on health and disease today.

Going beyond an individualized perspective, he poses audacious questions: What does it mean that patients are poor or uninsured and cannot afford suggested medicines? How can we deal with the air and water pollution that are producing a patient's illness? How do we respond to patients complaining about the safety and quality of drinking water in their neighborhood? Touching on infectious and noncommunicable diseases, as well as food, medicine, and water, Wounded Planet transcends the limited vision of mainstream bioethics to compassionately reveal how healthcare and medicine must take a broad perspective that includes the social and environmental conditions in which individuals live.

Meilaender suggests that the development bioethics as a discipline in its own right has not been entirely benign. He argues that an increasing focus on public policy has obscured the importance of background beliefs about human nature and destiny, and that without drawing attention to those beliefs one cannot fully see what is at stake in many bioethical debates. Rather than seeking a minimalist consensus, Meilaender explores ethical problems surrounding the end and beginning of life in order to uncover the "soul"--That is, some of the deeper issues within bioethics that need our attention. Abortion, the issue that so often lurks just beneath the surface of bioethical argument, is discussed in the final chapter. Throughout the book Meilaender emphasizes the "soul" of all these issues - questions about who we are and what we may become, and suggests that recapturing that soul will lead us to a new appreciation of the living body as the locus of personal presence.

A moving memoir and an extraordinary love story that shows how an expert physician became a family caregiver and learned why care is so central to all our lives and yet is at risk in today's world. When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman delivers a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and his marriage to Joan, and he describes the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caretaking. He also writes about the problems our society faces as medical technology advances and the cost of health care soars but caring for patients no longer seems important. Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work--at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonizing, but it is always rich in meaning. In the face of our current political indifference and the challenge to the health care system, he emphasizes how we must ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves, and of our doctors. To give care, to be "present" for someone who needs us, and to feel and show kindness are deep emotional and moral experiences, enactments of our core values. The practice of caregiving teaches us what is most important in life, and reveals the very heart of what it is to be human.

Catholic health care is one of the key places where the church lives Catholic social teaching (CST). Yet the individualistic methodology of Catholic bioethics inherited from the manualist tradition has yet to incorporate this critical component of the Catholic moral tradition. Informed by the places where Catholic health care intersects with the diverse societal injustices embodied in the patients it encounters, this book brings the lens of CST to bear on Catholic health care, illuminating a new spectrum of ethical issues and practical recommendations from social determinants of health, immigration, diversity and disparities, behavioral health, gender-questioning patients, and environmental and global health issues.