The legion of nettlesome, even litigious, issues at the interface of the entwined fields of law, public health, and ethics sorely warrant rapt, informed discussion. Indeed, unabashed confronting of the thicket of thorny issues overfilling the enmeshed, vexing fields of public health, law, and ethics is, in sooth, a Sisyphean task. Distinguished lawyer, experienced public health researcher, and very able writer Lawrence Gostin merits hearty felicitations for his workaday efforts in editing this prolix tome, entitled Public Health Law and Ethics: (...) a Reader, which illumines a quite broad swathe of the complex fabric of issues interconnecting law, public health, and ethics.The excellently edited tome crafted by Gostin is structured as a congeries of reprinted materials, principally academic articles and law cases, presented in excerpted fashion, with expert, insightful commentary provided by Gostin germane to the reprinted materials and generally appertaining to the practice and theory of public health law and ethics. Gostin assigned himself the daunting …. (shrink)

Codified moral medicine is an antidote to many problems, a bulwark against wallowing in the morass of moral idolatry, and a rampart that should be strengthened continually, rather than dismantled. The notion of medical professional self regulation, by means of codification and collaboration, was actually conceived in Britain, by Dr Thomas Percival, but born in America. The American Medical Ethics Revolution, through the medium of a tetrad of editors and a stellar collection of luminaries, displays the pedigree of codified American (...) medical ethical thought back to its earliest progenitor: the primordial 1847 American Medical Association (AMA) code of ethics. The clash of deftly handled academic sabres vivifies the medical ethical dimension of the practice of medicine in …. (shrink)