This book provides insights into dynamic and complex interrelationships between professionalism and medical practice. It does so by looking into the most relevant and recent theoretical and practical frameworks and by systematizing and integrating extensive and growing literature on medical professionalism. Through honest and prudent contributions from very diverse backgrounds and contexts, this book provides an understanding of medical professionalism derived from a broader historical and cultural context in order to contribute to everyday professional life and practice – the very place of its existence. The book presents the conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable demands and challenges physicians face in everyday practice. A better understanding of these fundamental issues is the only way for medicine to maintain and preserve its unique morality, the same one that enabled its existence in the first place. The book is relevant for everyone immersed and interested in the subject of medical professionalism as a resource, which may ease or guide them through the complexities of issues at hand. It will also contribute to the ongoing debate on medical professionalism, medical ethics, bioethics, and professionalism and ethics in general.

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.

In May 2023, WHO declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. In 2024, COVID-19 certainly has not gone away, but we can now take a more reflective look at the pandemic. This issue of the ERS Monograph does just that, bringing together a truly international group of experts, as befits a global illness, to consider areas such as: long-term sequelae in airway disease, interstitial lung disease, and in the immunocompromised; therapeutics in the community, in hospital and in the intensive care unit; and the pathophysiology and management of long COVID. The Guest Editors also consider the impact of COVID-19 on clinical research and scientific publishing, as well as looking to the future, considering what can be learnt from the pandemic.

Children in precarious health present particular problems for healthcare professionals because of their intimate relation to their family, and because of the family's need to provide major long-term source of support and to be actively involved in the decisions about their children's care. This collection of cases and commentaries in pediatrics highlights the difficult ethical dilemmas that can arise during high-tech hospital care of children in precarious circumstances. It serves as a teaching tool for clinical ethics and as an introduction for medical students and residents. Clinical cases are described in detail by the physicians involved, who focus on the ethical issues arising during treatment. Each case is then commented on in detail by a philosopher or other bioethicist. It thus serves well as an introduction to contemporary clinical bioethics, but with a firm grounding in the practicalities of real-life pediatric care in the hospital setting.

A theory of Clinical Bioethics based on the integration of the moral logic of health care practice ("internal morality") and the larger social concerns and processes ("external morality") Clinical Bioethics. A Search for the Foundations compares major theoretical models in the foundation of clinical bioethics and explains medicine as a normative practice. The goals of medicine are discussed with particular reference to the subjectivisation of health and the rationalisation of health care institutions. This volume provides a consistent reconstruction of bioethical judgment both at the level of epistemological statute and institutional context, i.e. clinical ethics committees and clinical ethics consultation.

Bioethics is the application of ethics to the broad field of medicine, including the ethics of patient care, research, and public health. In this book, prominent authors from around the globe discuss the complexities of bioethics as they apply to our current world. Topics range from the philosophical bioethics of the evolution of thinking about marriage from a religious standpoint to the bioethics of radiation protection to value-based medicine and cancer screening for breast cancer. Bioethics in Medicine and Society is wide-ranging, with additional chapters on the ethics of geoengineering, complementary and alternative medicine, and end-of-life ethical dilemmas. Readers with find that the field of bioethics has broad implications throughout society from our most intimate interpersonal relationships to policies being implemented on a global scale.