********* 9 Stars!
Price: US$ 6.99, Available worldwide on Amazon.com
Check Availability from: Canada or from United Kingdom
ISBN: 044922290X

Description

From Publishers Weekly
In novelistic detail, Belkin examines the cases of several patients in a Houston hospital and the ethical considerations of their doctors.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-- A look at medical ethics and the critical-care decisions made by the ethics committee, doctors, and four sets of patients/parents at Hermann Hospital in Texas between May-October 1988. Quality of life is measured against longevity and consideration is given to expenditure of limited resources. As most of these patients were children or young adults, the book has immediacy for high school students. The epilogue, written four years later, brings closure to decisions made. Young people interested in medicine or the health-care crisis are sure to find this involving.
- Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


From Library Journal
Taking her title from the physicians' Hippocratic Oath, Belkin, who covers medical issues for the New York Times, spent nearly three years with the Hermann Hospital Ethics Committee in Houston, Texas, researching this provocative book on medical ethics. The daily, convulsive questions of life and death that the committee struggles with are often questions without answers, yet they are somehow answered at the Hermann Hospital and in hospitals across the country every single day. Belkin quotes a Chinese proverb: if you save a life, you are responsible for it. The cruel, deceptively simple wisdom of this proverb is brought home on nearly every page of this entirely true, gripping, and dramatic account of how medical chance and technology trap the unsuspecting in a vise of brutal decision-making. Totally engrossing and highly recommended. For a theological perspective on medical ethics, see the review of Theological Voices in Medical Ethics on p. 122.
- James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Ingram
A former New York Times correspondent looks at the inner workings of Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas, and examines the most profound and complicated questions about life and death. Reprint. NYT. K.


Book Description
"A powerful, true story of life and death in a major metropolitan hospital...Harrowing... An important book."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
What is life worth? And what is a life worth living? At a time when America faces vital choices about the future of its health care, former NEW YORK TIMES correspondent Lisa Belkin takes a powerful and poignant look at the inner workings of Hermann Hospital in Houston, Texas, telling the remarkable, real-life stories of the doctors, patients, families, and hospital administrators who must ask--and ultimately answer--the most profound and heart-rendng questions about life and death.