The Health Care Professional As Friend and Healer: Building on the Work of Edmund D. Pellegrino

This book illuminates issues in medical ethics revolving around the complex bond between healer and patient, focusing on friendship and other important values in the healing relationship. Embracing medicine, philosophy, theology, and bioethics, it considers whether bioethical issues in medicine, nursing, and dentistry can be examined from the perspective of the healing relationship rather than external moral principles.

Distinguished contributors explore the role of the health professional, the moral basis of health care, greater emphasis on the humanities in medical education, and some of the current challenges facing healers today.

David C. Thomasma is the Fr. Michael I. English, SJ, Professor of Medical Ethics and Director of the Medical Humanities Program at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. Among his more than twenty books is Helping and Healing, with Edmund D. Pellegrino (Georgetown, 1997).

Judith Lee Kissell is an assistant professor at Georgia College and State University.