BiblioVault - Books about Social, Ethical & Legal Issues

Biomedicen and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics, Second Edition
Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Library of Congress QH332.A97 2021 | Dewey Decimal 174.2

This timely and up to date new edition of Biomedicine and Beatitude features an entirely new chapter on the ethics of bodily modification. It is also updated throughout to reflect the pontificate of Pope Francis, recent concerns including ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, and feedback from the many instructors who used the first edition in the classroom.

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False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing
Karen Buhler-Wilkerson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Library of Congress RT97 | Dewey Decimal 610.734

Since its initial publication in 1989 by Garland Publishing, Karen Buhler Wilkerson’s False Dawn: The Rise and Decline of Public Health Nursing remains the definitive work on the creation, work, successes, and failures of public health nursing in the United States. False Dawn explores and answers the provocative question: why did a movement that became a significant vehicle for the delivery of comprehensive health care to individuals and families fail to reach its potential? Through carefully researched chapters, Wilkerson details what she herself called the “rise and fall” narrative of public health nursing: rising to great heights in its patients' homes in the struggle to control infectious diseases, assimilate immigrants, and tame urban areas -- only to flounder during the later growth of hospitals, significant immigration restrictions, and the emergence of chronic diseases as endemic in American society.

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Importing Care, Faithful Service: Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital
Stephen M. Cherry
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Library of Congress RT86.3 | Dewey Decimal 610.73069

Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.

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Listening to the Whispers: Re-thinking Ethics in Healthcare
Edited by Christine Sorrell Dinkins and Jeanne Merkle Sorrell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
Library of Congress R724.L57 2006 | Dewey Decimal 174.2

Listening to the Whispers gives voice to scholars in philosophy, medical anthropology, physical therapy, and nursing, helping readers re-think ethics across the disciplines in the context of today's healthcare system. Diverse voices, often unheard, challenge readers to enlarge the circle of their ethical concerns and look for hidden pathways toward new understandings of ethics. Essays range from a focus on the context of corporatization and managed care environments to a call for questioning the fundamental values of society as these values silently affect many others in healthcare. Each chapter is followed by a brief essay that highlights issues useful for scholarly research and classroom discussion. The conversations of interpretive research in healthcare contained in this volume encourage readers to re-think ethics in ways that will help to create an ethical healthcare system with a future of new possibilities.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

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Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics: Cases, Concepts, and the Virtue of Prudence, Fourth Edition
Raymond J. Devettere
Georgetown University Press, 2016
Library of Congress R724.D48 2016 | Dewey Decimal 174.2

For more than twenty years Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics has offered scholars and students a highly accessible and teachable alternative to the dominant principle-based theories in the field. Raymond J. Devettere's approach is not based on an ethics of abstract obligations and duties but, following Aristotle, on how to live a fulfilled and happy life—in short, an ethics of personal well-being grounded in prudence, the virtue of ethical decision making.

New sections added in this revised fourth edition include sequencing whole genomes, even those of newborns; the new developments in genetic testing now provided by online commercial companies such as 23andMe; the genetic testing of fetuses by capturing their DNA circulating in the pregnant woman's blood; the Stanford Prison experiment and its relevance to the abuses at the Abu Graib prison; recent breakthroughs in the diagnosis of consciousness disorders such as PVS; the ongoing controversy generated by the NIH study of premature babies at many NICUs throughout the county, a study known as SUPPORT that the OHRP (Office of Human Research Protections, an office within the department of HHS) deemed unethical.

Devettere updates most chapters. New cases include Marlise Munoz (dead pregnant woman's body kept on life support by a Texas hospital), Jahi McMath (teenager pronounced dead in California but treated as alive in New Jersey), Margot Bentley (nursing home feeding a woman dying of end stage Alzheimer’s despite her advance directive that said no nourishment or liquids if she was dying with dementia), Brittany Maynard (dying 29-year-old California woman who moved to Oregon to commit suicide with a physician's help), and Samantha Burton (woman with two children who suffered rupture of membranes at 25 weeks and whose physician obtained a court order to keep her at the hospital to make sure she stayed on bed rest). Thoughtfully updated and renewed for a new generation of readers, this classic textbook will be required reading for students and scholars of philosophy and medical ethics.

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