Healthcare Ethics and Human Values – An Introductory Text with Readings and Case Studies

This volume illustrates the central importance of diversity of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are organized around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective. They run from staying well and 'first contact' through to either recovery or to long-term illness, death and dying.

K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at the University of Warwick, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the University of Oxford. He is the founder and editor of the first international journal for philosophy and mental health, PPP: Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology. He has published widely on philosophical and ethical aspects of mental health, in particular Moral Theory and Medical Practice (1989).

Donna L Dickenson is John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, the first such institute in Britain. Her recent books include Property, Women and Politics (1997), In Two Minds: Case Studies in Psychiatric Ethics (with Bill Fulford, 2000), and The Cambridge Medical Ethics Workbook Ethics (with Michael Parker, 2001).

Thomas H. Murray is President of The Hastings Center in Garrison, New York. He is a founding editor of the journal Medical Humanities Review, author of The Worth of a Child (1996), and editor, with Maxwell J. Mehlman, of The Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal and Policy Issues in Biotechnology (2000).